Lucian Blaga

Born May 9, 1895, in the village of Lancrám, Transylvania; died May 6, 1961, in Cluj. Rumanian poet and idealist philosopher.

In 1919, Blaga published the collection of verse Narrative Poems of the Light. Blaga’s poems are the expression of the poet’s reflections upon the world and human existence. In accordance with his idealist philosophical conceptions, Blaga portrays the inner world as metaphysically unchanging, but he presents it with various foreshortenings of sensuous and aesthetic perception. From Blaga’s point of view, art, thought, and science are necessarily determined by the unconscious. Blaga, especially in the first period of his work, cultivated free verse. He published a translation of W. Goethe’s Faust (1955) and an anthology From Lyrics of the World (1957).