EMINESCU, MIRAI. — The greatest Romanian poet, born at Ipotești (Botoșani) on 15 January 1850, died at Bucharest on 15 June 1889.
At sixteen, he published verses in the journal Familia (1866), which made him famous; he subsequently attended the faculty of letters and philosophy at Vienna and Berlin (1869–74); he was a member of the literary association Junimea (Youth) and later librarian of the University of Iasi, school inspector, and editor of the newspaper Timpul (1877–83).
Consumed by a chronic illness and distressed by political events, he despaired of the future of his country and, in the final song of revolt of the entire race, Doina (5 June 1883), exhausted his spiritual energy; on 28 June 1883 he lost his reason. His powerful activity includes: The Blue Prince of the Linden Tree (1875); Colin (1876); The Tale of the Forest (1878); Oh, I Remain; The Prayer of a Dacian (1879); Third Epistle (1881); Under the Uneven Fir Trees, Diana, Espero (1883); The Star in the Sky; A Single Desire, Doina, and the novellas Poor Dionysus (1872) and Cesara (1876), besides various political and social essays. The differing religious attitudes of the lyrics are explained as expressions of the states of mind through which his troubled spirit passed. Buddhism, Giordano Bruno, Kant, and Schopenhauer exerted a strong influence upon him. In the essay Religion (1880), written on the occasion of Leo XIII’s encyclical against the nihilists and communists, he exalts Catholicism as an advocate of a more advanced humanity; in the article The Iconographers of Mr Baldiman (13 November 1888), he exalts the beauty of Italian sacred images. He tends to project the particular into the universal, whence the cosmic and religious inspiration that pervades his most intimate song.