page_title: Alexandru Macedonski
section_title: Macedonski's school and its early impact
hierarchical_section_title: Alexandru Macedonski / Legacy / Macedonski's school and its early impact
caption_attribution_description: English: Romanian poet Alexandru Macedonski (seated, right), his son Alexis (standing) and epigrammatist Oreste Georgescu.
context_page_description: Alexandru Macedonski was a Romanian poet, novelist, dramatist and literary critic, known especially for having promoted French Symbolism in his native country, and for leading the Romanian Symbolist movement during its early decades. A forerunner of local modernist literature, he is the first local author to have used free verse, and claimed by some to have been the first in modern European literature. Within the framework of Romanian literature, Macedonski is seen by critics as second only to national poet Mihai Eminescu; as leader of a cosmopolitan and aestheticist trend formed around his Literatorul journal, he was diametrically opposed to the inward-looking traditionalism of Eminescu and his school.
  Debuting as a Neoromantic in the Wallachian tradition, Macedonski went through the Realist-Naturalist stage deemed "social poetry", while progressively adapting his style to Symbolism and Parnassianism, and repeatedly but unsuccessfully attempting to impose himself in the Francophone world. Despite having theorized "instrumentalism", which reacted against the traditional guidelines of poetry, he maintained a lifelong connection with Neoclassicism and its ideal of purity.
context_section_description: Alexandru Macedonski repeatedly expressed the thought that, unlike his contemporaries, posterity would judge him a great poet. With the exception of Mihail Dragomirescu, conservative literary critics tended to ignore Macedonski while he was alive. The first such figure was Junimea's Titu Maiorescu, who believed him to be a minor author, referring to him only a couple of times in his books and usually ridiculing him in his articles. One of these texts, the 1886 essay Poeți și critici ("Poets and Critics"), spoke of Macedonski as having "vitiated" poetry, a notion he also applied to Constantin D. Aricescu and Aron Densușianu. Especially radical pronouncements were left by the traditionalist authors Ilarie Chendi and Nicolae Iorga. Chendi wrote of Macedonski being "the caricature of a man", having "a feverish mind" and being motivated by "the brutal instinct of revenge". Iorga, who became better known as a historian, later retracted some of the statements he had made against the poet during the 1890s. Among the younger prominent traditionalist writers was the Transylvanian-born Lucian Blaga, who may have purposefully avoided Macedonski during his first visit to Bucharest in 1920. Although more sympathetic to the Symbolist author, both Dragomirescu and Gheorghe Adamescu tended to describe him as exclusively the product of French and Decadent literature, while Dragomirescu's disciple Ion Trivale denied all merit to Macedonski's literature.
  According to Tudor Vianu, Macedonski's intellectual friends (among them Anghel Demetriescu, George Ionescu-Gion, Bonifaciu Florescu, Grigore Tocilescu and V. A. Urechia) were largely responsible for passing down "a better and truer image of the abused poet." It was also due to Dragomirescu that Noaptea de decemvrie was included in a literature textbook for final grade high school students, which some argue is the poet's first-ever presence in the Romanian curriculum. According to historian Lucian Nastasă, the poet's wife Ana Rallet behaved like an "excellent secretary" while Macedonski was still alive, and thereafter helped sort and edit his manuscript while maintaining "an actual cult" for her husband.
  Macedonski's cosmopolitan circle was the center of a literary alternative to the prevailing conservatism and Eminescu-like traditionalism of the day, the latter tendency being grouped around Sămănătorul magazine for part of Macedonski's lifetime. While Macedonski himself maintained his links with Romanticism and Classicism, commentators have retrospectively recognized in him the main person who announced Romania's first wave in modernist literature. Many first-generation disciples were to part with his guidelines early on, either by radicalizing their Symbolism or by stepping out of its confines. Traian Demetrescu was one of the first to do so, focusing on his commitment to socialism—Vianu notes that the split took place "without coldness and the heart's versatility" on Macedonski's part. Literary researcher Lidia Bote argues that it was Petică who first illustrated mature Symbolism, emancipating himself from Macedonski's eclectic tendencies after 1902. By that time, the Symbolist authors Dimitrie Anghel and N. D. Cocea used Macedonski's fantasy prose as an inspiration for their own, and N. Davidescu was borrowing from his mystical discourse. The pictorial and joyous elements in Macedonski's poems were also serving to inspire Stamatiad, Eugeniu Ștefănescu-Est and Horia Furtună. In the early stages of his career, Ion Pillat wrote pieces which echo his master's choice of exotic themes. A more discreet legacy of Macedonski's ideas was also preserved inside the conservative and traditionalist camps. Although his separation from Literatorul was drastic, and led him to rally with Junimea, Duiliu Zamfirescu built on some elements borrowed from the magazine's ideology, incorporating them into his literary vision.
  Many of Macedonski's most devoted disciples, whom he himself had encouraged, have been rated by various critics as secondary or mediocre. This is the case of Theodor Cornel (who made his na
caption: Alexandru Macedonski (seated, to the right) facing Oreste Georgescu. Alexis Macedonski standing
exif: {}