Quotes by Vladimir Streinu

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Tradition is constituted from the past as well as from the future before our eyes, springing from the same.

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Contemporary literature, no matter how bold and non-conformist it may be, should not be seen in opposition to the concept of tradition, but only in its force to add up to tradition, as in their time the works of the past were added up...

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The first form, therefore, of a country's participation in what we call universal literature is national originality, which has no relation to the extent of its territory. But there is an additional factor to the universalization of any literature: it is the aspiration to the "spirit of the time".

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Looking at the Romanian culture from the air, it appears to us with several ages, all having a remarkable identity. This identity makes it able to be contained, in a single word of the critical dictionary: in "classicism"...

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The conclusion is only one. Contemporary literature is to be seen both in its movement of resorption in national specificity, and in that of enriching this specificity. Tradition is thus established before our eyes, springing both from the past and from the future.

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Only the analysis of the birth process of tradition, in which traditionalists appear as revolutionaries and innovators as future traditionalists, gives us the exact picture of reality...

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The poet can say about himself "non omnis moriar" - "I will not die completely"...

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There is no poet who has not written or does not write verse without a sense of the eternity of his work, just as there is no artist of any kind who is not carried by the belief that his art defeats the common condition of death...

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Tradition is a value of continuous flow and summation: it also means that those who judge the literary phenomenon by relating it only to its power to innovate or only to that of traditionalist conformity, are both wrong...

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Tradition and renewal are the dialectical terms of our literary development, and the removal of one, whatever it may be, prejudices the contribution of the other to the spiritual source which only their collaboration represents.

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In fact, these terms are so connected in Romanian culture that they cannot even be thought of separately except in the abstract. In their concrete reality, they command each other. What we call tradition today is actually innovative spirit resorbed in the specific sum of our literature.

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Art alone, among human pursuits, is eternal...

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As it used to be said, in contrast to the dryness of the exact sciences, poetry is a "gaia scientia", that is, the science of living life.

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His word brings together all the sciences in a confluence of knowledge through images. Images and symbols are his means of participating and making ourselves participate, by return, in the forms and pulsations of cosmic matter... Only the feeling of this full knowledge makes poetry the science of sciences which, dilating the reader's personality by liberating it of current automatisms, increases its life content...

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Artists can be modern without being superior to the classics or other great artists of the past. Historical superiority in art is an absurd idea. Quite the opposite is the position of the positive sciences in relation to history.

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Whoever, in art, does not innovate, is an epigon. The artist's right and duty is to be himself, vis-a-vis the scientist who has the duty to be first what his predecessors were and the right only to extend the range of their science.

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Having one's own conception of the world forces the construction of a correlative aesthetic conception, any philosophy responding explicitly or implicitly in a certain way of conceiving Poetry... Poetry and metaphysics could therefore seem to be two ways of asking ourselves on the same reality.

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Only the poets, with their new eyes and their well-known clumsiness, marvel at everything they see, whenever they see it, being therefore, today, the only authors of unanswered questions. There are some that have a notable cadence over time. They impose themselves on the spirit of man, after a periodicity incalculable in the future, but certain in the past... No age has escaped undeceived from their demand, and they have never been less new than they were to the anxiety of the first man... There are the questions of man for man, of spirit for spirit, of life for life...

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Good brothers of poets, philosophers were and are themselves, after all, also a kind of poet; they feed on the same substance...

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Moreover, the philosophers themselves, under the power of that circularity of limit questions, which is not only a recurrence in history, but also a cycle of congeneric anxieties, all felt the need to know what poetic beauty is, even if they speculated especially on music, their interest metaphysicians and non-metaphysicians necessarily went to the theory of artistic creation...

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Poetry and Philosophy could therefore appear to be two ways of man to inquire about reality...

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Anyway, at the mute threshold of existence, where only poets and philosophers dwell, theoretical conjecture and poetic metaphor have always been felt as possibilities of knowledge that supplement each other...

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The philosopher and the poet meet several times on their way, which ends where we can no longer distinguish it.

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The poet is a man of all sciences: he knows how the grass sprouts and withers, how beings are born and how they die, how a star rises and sets, how the sea boils and freezes, being in his own way and in turn for this, a naturalist, a biologist, an astronomer, a hydrologist...

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Art - science:... Art seduces and science convinces. The artist creates individually, his creation adding numerically to previous ones, while the scientist builds collectively, his work raising a common edifice. Artistic progress cannot therefore represent a growth that historical progress would ensure...