Arghezi, Tudor

(pseudonym of Ion Teodorescu). Born May 21, 1880, in Bucharest; died July 14, 1967, in Bucharest. Rumanian poet and academician.

In his youth Arghezi changed occupations many times. He became a monk but then left the monastery and lived in Switzerland for a long time. He began systematic literary work in 1904. In his poems—published in the collections Fitted Words, 1927; Flowers of Mold, 1931; Springtime Medallions, 1936; Seven Songs with Closed Mouth, 1939; and others—he affirmed the value of the human personality and its active, creative basis. He wrote anticlerical and anti-bourgeois pamphlets—the collections Wooden Icons, 1930; At the Black Gate, 1930; and Notes from the Country of Kuty, 1933. In 1943, Arghezi was arrested because of his pamphlet Baron, which was directed against Hitler’s Germany. The social and satirical elements in his creative work were clearly embodied in the cycle of poems entitled 1907 (1955), which was devoted to the most important peasant uprising in Rumania and which sung the praises of the people. Humanistic and constructive tendencies are also to be found in Arghezi’s cycled Song to Man (1955), which was awarded the State Prize of the Rumanian Socialist Republic in 1955.