Vasile Voiculescu

Vasile Voiculescu made his début in 1916 with a collection entitled Poems, the same year as his contemporary George Bacovia. Most of the few hundred copies printed were lost during the Second World War. Written in the manner of Vlahuță, and sometimes that or Mihai Eminescu, Alexandru Macedonski, or even Vasile Alecsandri, Voiculescu’s poetry was at first regarded as slightly old-fashioned, unsuited to the modernists times that had begun to become manifest.

In Poems with Angels (1927), Voiculescu turns toward Orthodox Christian traditionalism, which critic George Călinescu likens to that of Lucian Blaga, although both this collection and the later Destiny (1933) show the obvious influence of Tudor Arghezi, even going so far as pastiche.

In the same period, Voiculescu’s work defines poetry as an ars poetica, in which the poem does not reflect on any concrete reality but turns its gaze on poetry itself, mirroring the development of modernist and traditionalist lyricism in the period.

Voiculescu’s poetry is religious in theme in most of the collections he published in the interbellum, and his posthumously published poems, most written in the fifties, are not very different in their subject matter, although they also sometimes deal with physical illness and suffering. The Imagined Final Sonnets of William Shakespeare, published after his death in 1964, once again explore the art of poetry, as well as Shakespearian motifs such as death, fate, and love.

Voiculescu’s prose works were also discovered only after his death, and critic Nicolae Manolescu views them as subtle collages of ‘themes, motifs, situations, characters, in other words, literary reminiscences of the most various authors.’ Nevertheless, the modernism of the texts cannot be denied, and some of the short stories look forward to the kind of features that were to be encountered in the writers who emerged in the sixties.

Vasile Voiculescu was also the author of a novel, Zachey the Blind Man, on which he worked in the forties and fifties, but which was published posthumously only in 1966.