The official poet during the early years of the Communist regime and appointed a full member of the Romanian Academy, he is considered by many commentators to have actually been a second-shelf writer, with a problematic legacy.

He was the father of Sorin Toma, a Romanian Communist Party activist and journalist himself noted for his commitment to Socialist Realism, as well as for his officially endorsed attacks on the influential poet Tudor Arghezi.

[3] This period saw his alignment with the Marxist movement: after writing for Munca daily, he became involved with the socialist tribune, Lumea Nouă, where he published rhyming satires under the pseudonyms of Hâncu and Falstaff.

The volume was paid for by Toma's friends and collaborators, but received much critical interest,[17] and was positively reviewed by modernist theorist Eugen Lovinescu in his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature.

[23] Alexandru Toma's moment of preeminence occurred by the time he was in his seventies, when the newly established Communist regime came to promote him as a paramount representative of Proletkult literature and as the greatest Romanian poet alive.

[22] Writing in 1948, Romania's official Marxist-Leninist ideologue and Agitprop supervisor Leonte Răutu casually referred to Toma as "the poet most connected to the [communist] party", while criticizing his own subordinate, Nicolae Moraru, for having failed to acknowledge the fact.

[25] Thus, Toma's works were for the first time introduced in the school textbooks, where, alongside those by Communist short story writer Alexandru Sahia and the left-leaning novelist Sadoveanu, they stood as the sole samples of 20th-century Romanian literature.

[27] Both he and Sadoveanu, together presiding over the 1949 establishment of a politicized Writers' Union,[28] were paid homage with special festivities, which, according to literary critic Florin Mihăilescu, evidenced a personality cult equivalent only to those of Joseph Stalin and local Party leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

[30] Virtually all of Toma's literary contributions were published in one volume, titled Cîntul vieții ("The Song of Life") and prefaced by the Communist essayist Ion Vitner,[31] which went through three editions between 1950 and 1954.

[39] Toma, who displayed a dose of self-criticism over various moments of weakness in his career, underlined his own role in "the careful, masterful, cultivation of a renewed, simple, clear form, well-suited to Socialist Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism.

[26] The textbook ended with an anthology of newer literary works by authors in favor with the regime—alongside poet Mihai Beniuc, these included Banuș, Deșliu, Jebeleanu, Porumbacu, Aurel Baranga, Mihail Davidoglu, Petru Dumitriu, as well as a few others—and a similar overview of Soviet literature.

[26] It was at this stage that, in his University of Bucharest lectures, Vitner came to refer to Toma as a "national poet", placing him alongside Neculuță, Sahia and the early 20th century socialist Constantin Mille.

[8] In spring 1953, after Stalin's death was made known to the world, Toma was one of the tens of prominent Romanian authors who contributed articles in his memory; his piece, titled Viață dați stalinistului gînd!

[45] Late in life, Toma headed Editura de stat pentru literatură și artă, an official publishing house tasked with enforcing the main editorial policies, and, according to philologist and memoirist Gheorghe Pienescu, was "its last (or so I thought) dogmatic Stalinist director.

It also included George Bacovia, Traian Demetrescu, Mihail Cruceanu and Andrei Naum, contrasting to both the Parnassian school of Alexandru Macedonski and the balladesque style associated with Ștefan Octavian Iosif.

Eugen Lovinescu proposed that, while being the "direct inheritor" of Eminescu's creation, and placed under his "overwhelming influence", Toma's Poezii also showed his admiration for Coșbuc, Vlahuță, Panait Cerna, Corneliu Moldovanu and D.

Noting the similarities between Toma's concepts and the ideas voiced, in the same generation, by poet Haralamb Lecca, Lovinescu argued that Poezii evidenced "a great and honest professional consciousness, an inspiration of intellectual quality, laid out in impeccable volutes".

According to Ion Simuț, Cîntul vieții, whose title alluded to "the necessity of optimistically singing hymns to life and completely ignoring the theme of death", was a repository for "opportunistic literature" and "all sorts of clichés.

Some of his works dealt with moments that the Communist regime considered emblematic, such as the October Revolution, the Grivița Strike of 1933, and World War II Soviet entry into Romania.

[40] Other poems of the same year celebrated the "fight for peace" endorsed by official Eastern Bloc propaganda after the start of the Cold War, condemning nuclear armament while depicting Joseph Stalin in eulogistic terms:

Pieri-veți fauri de război Sub potopirea vieții noi Și-n slujba noastră stă atomul Dar ca să-nalțe viața, omul.

[58] Also according to Lucian Boia, Toma's belonging to one of Romania's ethnic minorities was of further interest to the regime, at a time when proletarian internationalism was highlighted in official discourse: "the recourse to 'other nationalities' seemed to the new masters as an ideal method to crush the traditional cultural patterns.

"[7] Although Ion Vitner's study on Alexandru Toma served as a model for Mihail Novicov's monograph on Sadoveanu,[59] the poet himself was fading out of official discourse by the moment of his death.

[8][20][21][64][65][66] According to Ovid Crohmălniceanu, the dissenting communist and literary critic, the younger Toma simply acted on his father's "senile ambition" to replace Arghezi as the nation's leading poet.

[70] Lucian Boia noted that Călinescu's point made a distinction between purely aesthetic criteria, which Communism had come to associate with "the bourgeois era", and the supposed value of poets as "announcers and creators [...] of a new world".

In his book of memoirs, Academy member and historian David Prodan recounted how, when speaking of how Toma had "selected his own path", Călinescu made a gesture that seemed to mimick a horse with blinders.

[70] The address alarmed members of the cultural establishment: Traian Săvulescu, urged on by the official historians Mihail Roller and Constantin Daicoviciu, asked George Călinescu to explain himself (the latter subsequently reiterated Toma's merits as a poet).

[71] Boia argued that other samples of Călinescu's address may have been evidence of "mockery", hidden among eulogistic arguments—while noting that these did little to shadow his role in promoting Toma as a major poet, and that his overall attitude reminded one of "doublethink" (a concept coined by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four).

[58] In reference to these two contradictory aspects, he cited Călinescu saying to Toma: "Not only are your lyrics indescribably beautiful artistically, but they highlight a combatant gray hairness, in love with the turmoil, instigating to an acute fight, a burning trust in progress.

[74] The revised edition of his History of Romanian Literature, written during the 1960s and republished by Alexandru Piru in 1982, included an abrupt mention of Toma, simply indicating his family and place of birth.