Ion Barbu: The Lesson on the Cone
Ion Barbu: The Lesson on the Cone

Summary/Abstract: This article is an attempt to read Ion Barbu’s “Din ceas dedus”[From Time Deducted..],”, the celebrated poem the opens the poet’s only volume of poetry, Joc secund [Second Game] through Bergsonian lenses. The hypothesis we start from is that the generating matrix and the main themes of Barbu’s poetics and hermetic poems have their pendants in Bergsonian thinking—the same outright hostility towards contemporary positivism, determinism and causality, some fundamental ideas about time, literary / artistic language, intuition, the nature and function of art, the artist’s relation to his work, the nature of the creative process, impersonality in art, shared by both of them. Henri Bergson provided the Ion Barbu with the fertile theoretical foundations, and helped him develop his own teurgical impulse of participating in the dynamic processes of life emerged, which he strongly believed that poetry could stimulate.

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