Dimitrie Nanu (1873-1943) is one of those poets for whom posterity has shown an indifference near to oblivion, although the poet received in 1937 the National Poetry Prize and was - during the beginning of the century and interwar period - an appreciated writer. Nichifor Crainic, the most thorough researcher of the "spirituality of Romanian poetry" considers him as an "honorable figure in the literary movement of his time, but with no echo in public, as a man." Dimitrie Nanu is a declared enemy of modernist poetry of his time which, it seemed to the poet, strives hard to encode its poetic message, rather than naturally and clearly communicate it to the reader, as the sincere expression of their own feelings. Fervent reader of ancient Greek philosophy, the Bible and the great european mystics, Dimitrie Nanu wrote a poetry full of earnest exhortations to moral elevation of man. The poems about nature, pastels influenced by the descriptive poetry of Coşbuc and Șt. O. Iosif, are permeated with wonder at the creation, the poet trying to find reasons for his exhortations to Christian life. In his poems of historical evocation of the cycle Patria (The Homeland), Dimitrie Nanu appears as a precursor of Ioan Alexandru.

Keywords: Dimitrie Nanu, religious poetry, literary history, Ioan Alexandru

ION BUZAŞI