👤Author
Name: Radu Voinescu
Affiliation: Președintele Secției de Critică și Istorie Literară, filiala București, Uniunea Scriitorilor din România
Contact: radu_voinescu@yahoo.co.uk
📄Article
Citation Recommendation: VOINESCU, Radu. “The universe of poetry or the hidden dimension of G. Călinescuʼs criticism”. În: RITL, New Series, XIX, January-December 2025, p. 113–126. doi: 10.59277/2025.19.08.
Title: THE UNIVERSE OF POETRY OR THE HIDDEN DIMENSION OF G. CĂLINESCU’S CRITICISM
Pages: 113–126
Language: English
URL: https://ritl.ro/pdf/2025/8_R_Voinescu.pdf
DOI: 10.59277/ritl.2025.19.08
Abstract: G. Călinescu’s critical work is vast and offers not only opportunities to ascertain how extensive his concerns and knowledge in various fields were, but also the depth of his theoretical reflection. Unfortunately, sometimes, the apparent facility of his writing could lead to false judgments, because some of the critics failed to notice, beyond the foam of the texts, the intensity of the ideas, their topicality, the sense of accuracy combined with a rare sense of the relativity of things and opinions, the ability to handle an immense amount of information, a complex analytical spirit and a special gift for synthetic constructions.
A text preserved for many years among his manuscripts and only relatively recently made accessible to the general public, namely, the first version of The Universe of Poetry, shows once again a critic open to broad horizons and a creator who, without seeking to impose a system, nevertheless used his own aesthetic ideas to build an important work, of striking modernity, which shines through beyond a firm traditionalism. Examined today, this traditionalist side is nothing more than evidence of an inspired way of framing into the mainstream.
Key-words: The universe of poetry, aesthetic systems, surface text versus deep text, the hidden scope of texts, poetic objects, pan-poeticity, comparatism