Ion Vatamanu: poezia ca experienţă şi experiment

Abstract

This article analyzes the poetics of Ion Vatamanu, a significant poet in the area between the Prut and Nistru rivers, in the '60-'80s of the 20th century. There are envisaged definitory aspects of innovative poetics having a complicated path with some hesitation in the assimilation of the Whitman model, at the beginning of the track, hesitations between transitive and reflexive language, between prosaism, gigantism, free verse, and "the sweet classical style", the imaginary collective sixties. The metonymy and the emblematic symbol are replaced by the haunting metaphor, which evolves into a system of metaphors, heralding a personal poetic myth, later escalating into a transparent symbolism from the poetry of the national sentiment. Poetics is in direct ratio with the elusive or subversive background of modernist or traditionalist poems, the speech alternating between serious and ironic rhetoric, intimate lyrics and poem with a ballad kernel.