Quotes by Ion Pillat

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The poetry of a people cannot become of universal interest until it finds and exploits its own national soul in its highest artistic form.

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From the many definitions through which criticism of all times has tried - often contradictory - to capture the intimate being, the essence of the poetic phenomenon, the only one that cannot be contested by anyone, remains the banal finding that poetry is the art of the word...

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We cannot therefore speak of a poetry of universal expression - as, perhaps, through the materials used, all plastic or musical arts are - but only of national poems, expressed in different languages, with no possibility of strict equivalences...

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In opposition to the novel and the short story, to the drama and the comedy whose subject and action can be transposed into another language, lyric poetry... is by definition even untranslatable, because the content and the form cannot be dissociated here without destroying all or almost all the charm and enchanting power of the simplest verse.

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Romanticism... was not only a movement of the common sensibility of an era, but also one of national reawakening.