L’imaginaire metapoétique chez Mihai Eminescu
The metapoetic imaginary at Mihai Eminescu

Summary/Abstract: The textual volume of Eminescu's metapoetic imaginary is impressive, as his explicit ars poetica “contaminates” about 1/3 of his literary creation. Whole poems or numerous fragments (especially of his posthumous creation) form the “poetry of poetry” of Eminescu. In addition, there is his “literature about literature”, consisting of a few prose works and prose fragments, articles (published or not), letters (posted or not), hundreds of notices left in manuscript, annotations to translations and courses, etc. The fact is unique for the Romanian literature of the last century, since Eminescu is an scriptor additus scriptor who finds an equivalent only in the personality of a writer-critic-theoretician of his century the likes of a Poe, a Baudelaire, or a Mallarmé. If the modern age of poetry (for which Roland Barthes proposed as a conventional landmark the year 1850) begins when the poetic language works on itself, is “self-centered”—as Roman Jakobson would say—pointing out the self-reflective capacity of discourse through the interference of text and metatext, then the post-romantic, modern Romanian poetry synchronises, through Eminescu, the moment of its appearance with the one of Western modern poetry.

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