SOURCE: Mihaescu, Valentin F. “The Sap of Ideas.” Romanian Review 40, no. 1 (1986): 36-41.

In the following essay, Mihaescu studies the relationship between Eminescu's poetry and his journalism.

After the death of Mihai Eminescu, about whom Titu Maiorescu, with all his reticence in using superlatives, wrote in 1886 that “he had brought Romanian poetry to a peak of perfection,” his work became a real object of worship for the younger generations. A wave of epigones, among whom noteworthy are Alexandru Vlahuţă (1858-1919) and Panait Cerna (1881-1913), imitated his style punctiliously, and Eminescu's poetry, especially the anthumous poems, steadily penetrated deeper and deeper in the readers' conscience, thanks to the proliferation of editions from his poems and biographical novels. If before 1884, (the date when Titu Maiorescu put together the first edition of poems, with a preface by himself), Eminescu's fame did not get beyond the circle of “Junimea”, for two decades beginning...