SOURCE: Mihaescu, Valentin F. “Aspects of the Love Discourse.” Romanian Review 41, no. 1 (1987): 62-7.

In the following essay, Mihaescu discusses love and eroticism in Eminescu's poetry.

In Mihai Eminescu's poetry, very much as in the work of all the great poets of the world, the erotic theme holds an essential place both by its frequency and especially by the profoundness of its treatment. His typically romantic temperamental structure presupposing tremendous interior combustions, and certain biographical conjunctures that seemed to foster the poet's restless and perpetually dissatisfied spirit imparted to the erotic relationship in his poetry a dramatic dimension with tragic accents of grief. An analysis of the love discourse in the poems published during Mihai Eminescu's lifetime offers the complex picture of an exceptional sensitivity coupled with a rare reflexive capacity. Eminescu's lyric hero is “love-sick” and he turns this suffering and the memory of it into a singular...