The Poetry of Defiance, the Defiance of Poetry. A Special Case of the “Lost Generation”
The Poetry of Defiance, the Defiance of Poetry. A Special Case of the “Lost Generation”

Summary/Abstract: The “war generation”, also known as the “lost generation”, marks a moment of rupture in Romanian literature, by denouncing the literary tradition and the aesthetic canons and by the wish to renew it. A particular case of the “lost generation” is Ion Caraion. The poet expresses a structural existential apostasy, an aesthetic revolt, historically circumscribed, and an iconoclastic attitude toward everything “old” and “outdated” in existence, mentality, and literature, in the name of the new and of the future, driven by messianic ideals. In resounding manifesto texts and fulminant poems, he pleads for the separation from tradition, for an aesthetic revolution, for the new literature, for a new poetry, inspired from the original sources of existence, close to the genuine and intense life, for authenticity and originality. In his conception of literature context, under the auspices of the “new poetry”, Caraion writes poetry of defiance, defying, in this way, the poetry in “traditional” vision. Through his poetic work under the sign of rebellion and renewal, but also through his tragic existence, Ion Caraion is an exemplary poet of the “lost generation”.

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