Alexandru Ruja

Radu Stanca – the tragically feeling and the esthetical tension

The study pursues Radu Stanca’s poetical creation, torn between the tragic feeling and the aesthetic tenssion. A significant member of Sibiu Literary Circle, Radu Stanca has not only a vast poetical work, but a profound and singular one, on the dimension of existential meditation. The poet’s existential destiny, who died at a relatively young age, filled his poetry with an acute sense of tragic. Living in suffering becomes the adequate state for poetical creation, always situated between the tragic feeling and the aesthetic tension.

Radu Stanca wrote ballads, but also theoretized the problem of the ballad. His most well-known theoretical text is The Resurrection of the Ballad. The revival of the ballad is understood as a possibility to invigorate poetry, but also to achieve a “modern poetical spore”. For Radu Stanca, the resurrection of the ballad does not mean to go back to obsolete poetical forms, lacking value, but, on the contrary, it means the accomplishment of another moment of the existence of poetry, who will aim at the future. It cannot be said that his prognostic was wrong. All the poets of the Literary Circle cultivated the ballad and the grouping of the Literary Circle remains an essential one in Romanian literature, marking another age of modernity, which can be called with a term, not very appropriate, of course, neomodernism. It is a literary grouping that synchronised Romanian literature with the level of European literature. The study also shows the contribution of the writer the placement of Romanian literature in European context.