Lucian Blaga, poet and philosopher is, after Mihai Eminescu, the most important link within Romanian culture between tradition and modernity, between a 'heroic age' of trial and survival and the new age of consolidation. Blaga was a poet of double vocation, an innovator and also a consolidator. While his early poems express the spirit of a transformed type of Expressionism, his later ones illustrate a more skeptical attitude towards reality. Of course, all these poems illuminate and are illuminated by different sides of Blaga's philosophy; and at the same time they render the conceptual aspects of Blaga's work problematic, submitting them to a poetic interrogation. Lucian Blaga was the first Romanian poet whose work synchronized with some essential European artistic forms, his most important achievement being, perhaps, that of adapting Expressionism to Romanian poetry but also managing to keep an original course of his work, reappraising the models and relieving the "will to modernity" in terms specific to Romanian culture.
Modernity; tradition; modern poetry; secondary; Expressionism