Quotes by Pompiliu Constantinescu

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The most troubling problem of a writer's consciousness is the problem of survival; it is not a question of the greater or lesser place he will occupy in the history of culture and literature after death, but of those achievements which will become permanent values, to which all successive generations can form and bow.

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Any aesthetic act closes a psychological act. It is easier to reach the "aesthetic universe" through the "moral universe".

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The reader of modern poetry, when he himself is not an initiate and an aficionado, quickly gets disorientated, between so many ways, fashions, trends, currents and subcurrents, in which lyricism has complicated, refined if not rarefied the means of expression, beyond all his inherited and perpetuated habits, through a limited literary education... Faced with so many impediments, he summarily concludes that, from a certain limit, there is no more poetry, that the world mocks him, with innocence or perversity, and that it no longer has any criterion to distinguish between what is and what is not lyrical art.

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Hermeticism is the expression of a structure, the approximation of some essences, which cannot be captured by common language. Hermetic is also the lyric of Ion Barbu and the lyric of Lucian Blaga; of special essences, their final hermeticism corresponds to special structures.

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It could be said, in certain cases, that the expression in poetry was invented to hide the feeling, and I do not immediately think of what has been called hermeticism in the modern lyric, for hermeticism is not only a formal attitude, which would assume that the expression would lock the void. In this case, it would simply be a farce, an external game, without substance...

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But poetry dies, among other things, slowly intoxicated by metaphysics; it suffocates itself by hermeticism, it sterilizes itself by intelligence, it commits suicide by the confusion that it must identify itself with an act of knowledge, forgetting that in essence it is song, it is naked sensibility, it is screaming, it is itself, and it cannot be substituted either metaphysics, nor science, nor any other speculative field...

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Eminescu experienced the intuition of death and the vanity of love, and if his superb scream reached the upper limit of lyricism, the ceiling of metaphysics, it did not sterilize the emotion at all; ... After him, Tudor Arghezi, in another sense, relived the same experience and found the pure springs of poetry, without freezing them under the cold breath of intelligence; ... After both, an authentic metaphysician, like Lucian Blaga, clearly feeling the boundaries between philosophy and poetry, without overlapping them, lived the experience of the drama of the mystery in substantial verses ...

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We know, however, that great poetry, at its extreme limit, borders on metaphysics, but does not overlap, does not identify metaphysics; sensitivity is the living source of lyricism, human experience, deep, pathetic...

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There has been so much glossing over the concept of poetry that a metaphysics of lyricism has been reached, and even an identification of metaphysics with lyricism.

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From Baudelaire to the present day, poetry not only did not become silent, but went towards the essences, towards hidden sources that the creators of the happy auroral age of the lyrical myth did not even suspect. And since then, poets and thinkers have glossed over the essence of lyricism, to the point of subtlety...

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In the monadic perspective, art is an essential completeness. It is the very experience that the monad or individual expresses to itself and for itself. It is imaginative spirituality, or, in other words, the manifestation of mission or formative instinct, which lasts as long as this mysterious movement which is human life lasts.

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In believing, we are ourselves and express, in real terms, our metaphysical power to enrich reality. Art is participation in the totality of nature, because it immediately relates or connects the human spirit with the ever-enriching totality or whole...

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What is sadder than laurels that begin to crumble?

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Ambition is man's liveliest instinct; it is not extinguished either when it is a submediocrity, nor even when it is decaying; it's an instinct for biological preservation of the individual... Man's aspirations are beyond his strength, in fools as well as in geniuses; at first the effort is against nature - ridiculous; for others, it's painful - tragic.