Hugo Friedrich and Romanian Poetry Criticism

Abstract

The present chapter analyzes the longstanding impact of Hugo Friedrichs The Structure of Modern Poetry (1956) on Romanian culture, where it became a genuine Bible for poetry criticism. This success owed primarily to two of the book’s traits: its “formalist,” i.e., non-political perspective, which ensured its popularity in the former Eastern Bloc as well, where it could fuel the cultural policy of aesthetic autonomy, and the very limited understanding of modern poetry it put forward, which allowed for conceptualizing a series of alternative modernities. Both of these reasons proved decisive in Romania, where Friedrichs book not only played a fundamental role in the understanding of modernism and, later on, of postmodernism, but supported - either by being assimilated or contested - all the milestones in poetry criticism of the last half-century and was paramount for several investigations into the current state of Romanian literature