The Romanian nation wants Romanian poetry to embrace all its feelings, its national, political, social aspirations, to be the reflection of everything it feels, everything it hopes for, everything it suffers.
Through Poetry, all the experiences that human reason has drawn from events and from the investigation of the nature of things have been transmitted to later generations.
All the ancient legislators were poets: it is proven from the laws they consecrated through Poetry... As long as the human race lives, this noble faculty of its will also live, against those who say that its power has passed; its power is planted in the heart of man, and when its affections, its needs and desires will change, it will always be forward to ennoble them, to idealize them...
If literature were only a verbal algebra, anyone could produce a book, still trying variations.
Those who claim that art should not propagate doctrines are usually referring to those enemies of their own doctrines.
Every writer creates his forerunners. His approach transforms our conception of the past, just as it transforms the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of people has no meaning.
The book is not individuality without communication; it's a relationship, an axis of immunerable relationships. A literature differs from another, later or earlier, not so much by the text as by the way in which it is read.
A book necessarily endowed with certain merits is not classic; classic is, however, the book that generations of people, driven by different reasons, read with an anticipated fervor and with a mysterious propriety...
The poet of our times cannot turn his back on his age.
For a true poet, every moment of life, every fact should be intensely poetic, since, deep down, this is the truth.
A poet's glory depends, after all, on the interest or indifference of generations of anonymous people who put it to the test, in the solitude of libraries...
The emotions which literature arouses may indeed be eternal, but the means employed will have to vary constantly, even to a minute extent, in order not to lose their own virtues. For they begin to wear out as the lecturer recognizes them...Hence the danger of asserting that there are classical works, and that they will always be classical.
At the beginning of literature is myth, and so at its end.
Poetry is no less mysterious than other elements of the universe. Even a happy verse has no way of filling us with pride, for it is nothing but a gift of Hazard or of the Spirit; only the errors belong to us.
All that pertains to life, including humiliations, failures, misfortunes, have all been given to the artist as a clay, a material for his art; and he must take advantage... This is why I spoke, in one of my poems, about the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. These were given to us for us to transfigure, so that, out of the miserable circumstances of our lives, we might build eternity or the thing that aspires to eternity.
It is impossible to conceive a literary work, of any lasting and representative value, of the time and society, in which it appeared, without representing at least something of the soul of the era, that is, of what binds people into a homogeneous whole with the same views on the great problems of life.
A masterpiece of literature can only be that work which represents to the highest degree, as completely and artistically as possible, the characteristic features of the age...
The poet interprets the great symphony of life, expressing, through the means of his art, his feeling towards it, towards its various parts.
Ethical and aesthetic... raw materials whose symbiosis can give the true work of art. The aesthetic is the essence of art, through it fulfilling its destiny. But he alone in a literary work, however successful it may be from an artistic point of view, is a barren flower; in order to bear fruit, not only to delight the eyes, it must join with the bearer of fruit, bearer of perpetuity.
The writer must judge the fact, and not only in the light of its determinations, but also in the social effects, framing everything in social life, with its morals and customs... A viable work cannot be conceived without this direct or indirect confession of adherence or the author's repudiation of the social fact that forms the core of the work. It is not the historical fact, but the author's attitude towards it, of approval or detestation, that determines the moral character of the work... The ethic of art is its very rationale.
The act of poetic creation is a Palladian act. He implies the lucid possession of all modes of art to the condition of an oracle poet of the unconscious, ignorant of his own profession, an indignity attaches.
It goes without saying that an author must be employed. For me, this is a premise, a foundation, and what I put on this foundation is what I mean by art.
Each work is a universe, testifying to a self that only the work itself can reveal.
Surrealism is based on trust in the higher reality of certain forms of associations neglected until then, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to completely overwhelm all other psychic mechanisms and substitute them in solving the main problems of life.
To create like a god, to command like a king, to work like a slave.
Art is a big YES answer to life.
Art does not raise people above themselves, but within themselves.
Simplicity is not a goal in art, but you arrive, in spite of yourself, at simplicity if you approach the real meaning of things.
In art, what matters is joy. Have the happiness to contemplate ( - marvel)! This is everything.
Artists' raison d'être is to reveal the beauty of the world.