His literary activity only lasted about two years, between his high school graduation and his death from tuberculosis, but made him a critically acclaimed presence inside Romania's Symbolist movement.
Once rediscovered and published some twenty years after his death, it brought him posthumous recognition as a writer of talent, but one whose introversion and nostalgia ran contrary to the main currents in modernism.
Romanticizing his own physical suffering while adopting stylistic elements from French Symbolist classics such as Paul Verlaine, D. Iacobescu left lyric poetry that is either resigned or visionary in dealing with mortality.
The contrast between his approach and that of other, more avant-garde, Romanian Symbolists did not prevent Iacobescu's affiliation with the modernist circle at Ion Minulescu's Insula magazine.
Born in Craiova as the son of physician Iacobsohn and his wife Doroteea,[2] the future D. Iacobescu belonged to the Jewish-Romanian community, being one of several Jewish members of his early modernist generation to make an impact on Romanian literature.
[5] In spring 1912, Iacobescu became an affiliate of the literary circle formed by Minulescu around the short-lived review Insula (the existence of which marked a coming of age in Romanian Symbolism).
"[7] In addition to lending his contribution to Insula, Iacobescu had his various poems published by several other literary magazines or newspapers: Flacăra, Noua Revistă Română, Ramuri, Ilustrația Națională, Arta, Biruința[8] and Noi Pagini Literare.
[13] In Tudor Vianu's opinion, Iacobescu was primarily a pre-modernist and "minor poet of great talent", whose work evidenced a stage in Romanian poetry that preceded the wartime effort.
"[14] A particular trait of Iacobescu's poetry, which placed him in line with the stylistic choices of many Romanian Symbolists, was its use of color-related epithets, particularly "synesthesic" ones (and, according to researcher Carmen Niculescu, with a personal palette of black, gray and blood red).
While noting that Iacobescu found in French Symbolism "images suited to his own nostalgia, ships, ports, arctic seas, gulls, parks, fountains", Călinescu suggests that the parallel imagery of fêtes galantes is excessive: "Pierrots, Columbinas, lords, misses, minuets, gavottes, pianos, mandolins, guitars, pinkish, purple, gray salons, all in a too specifically French atmosphere, pushed to the point where it evokes the Bourbons".
"[16] Călinescu believes the "personal note" of Iacobescu's literary contribution is to be found in lyric poems which deal with his sickness, with solitude and depression, detailing states such as "the strain of hearing to the vibrations of silence" or "the sensitivity in relation to rain".
[20] Cazimir suggests that the latter influence is to be found in the poem Prin ceață ("Through the Fog"), where Iacobescu likens streetlights to ghosts that have no choice but to play audience to tomcats in heat.
"[22] This trait, Vianu notes, is especially observable in settings such as Scenă de seară ("Evening Scene"), where patients in a mental institution marvel as one of them plays the ballerina, and where contentment suddenly becomes violence:
Mincu's work also placed Iacobescu's taste for the ballade poetic form in relation to the balladesque poetry of the 1940s, in particular with that produced by the modernist Sibiu Literary Circle.
[28] In 2014, Ștefan Bolea republished Iacobescu's only volume, Quasi, along with literary references and personal commentary in a critical edition, praised by Oliviu Crâznic in Apostrof [1].