His youth is hard to reconstruct, due to patchy records and Stelaru's own passion for autofiction; it is however known that he lived in extreme poverty in Bucharest, romantically involved with a tuberculosis-stricken woman, who became the focus of his early love poems.

By 1944, he had built up a literary network which included Jebeleanu, Tonegaru, Geo Dumitrescu, Ion Caraion, Pavel Chihaia, Ben Corlaciu, Mihu Dragomir, and Miron Radu Paraschivescu.

Stelaru lived out the ban as an unemployed man in Turnu Măgurele, but was slowly reinstated in the mid-1950s, when he was allowed to publish modern fairy tales and works of children's drama.

Să nu te apropii de sufletul meu Cînd sînt plecat[6] Never approach my soul When I'm away Dumitru Jr, known to his family as "Mitea" or "Mitia", was baptized a Romanian Orthodox in Parascheva Church, where Pasca's father was a cantor.

[2] He told several self-aggrandizing stories such as having once visited Paris to meet with Louis Bromfield; when pressed about the details, he responded: "I traveled there by truck, I hardly remember anything, I was drunk the whole time.

[16] The herald of a "cynical generation" in Romanian poetry,[19] he became an unwilling mentor to debuting poets who had lionized him, primarily including Miron Radu Paraschivescu and Geo Dumitrescu.

However, the loyal man that he was, he recognized, within a few years, the presence of an authentic poet, and did more than a reparation: just shortly before he died, he penned a small, unreservedly enthusiastic study on Stelaru's poetry.

"[21] Writer Eugen Barbu, who first encountered Stelaru's work through Lovinescu's portrait, notes that the effect was a "jolt[ing] of the bourgeois mindset that was prevalent in that age, now ready to admit that poets could wear greasy trench coats directly over their skin.

[25] The poet cultivated his own legend as a combatant in World War II, but was in fact a draft evader: he persuaded the military authorities by claiming, falsely so, that he was taking care of many younger siblings, and that he had been diagnosed as a schizoid type.

[26] In March 1942, a group of actors, including Maria Filotti and Tantzi Cocea, decided to stage a benefit show, collecting money "toward editing a book by poet Dimitrie Stelaru."

[2] Stelaru's contribution is uneven and difficult to classify by a single standard; his poetry is one of damnation and bohemian existence; drawing freely from Poe and especially Paul Verlaine, it is heavily marked by Expressionism.

[34] Stelaru's poems were given a public reading by Alexandru Talex during the commemoration of Istrati's death in April 1943, to an audience comprising Panait Mușoiu, Aida Vrioni, and Ștefan Voitec.

[33][25][36] The narrative in Zeii prind șoareci suggests that Stelaru was planning to live in hiding in Turnu Măgurele, "where the land ends", but that he was ultimately forced to move out of the area.

In February 1948, they settled in Northern Dobruja, where Despina worked at various schools including that of Chirnogeni; a daughter, Eumene Iustina, was born to the couple in late 1949, while they were living in Negru Vodă.

[38] The nascent communist regime clamped down on nonconformist literature, and, after Cetățile albe, Stelaru underwent the fate of several in his literary generation—including his friends Dumitrescu, Tonegaru, and Pavel Chihaia.

[41] According to one notice from November 1948, Stelaru was preparing for print a children's book, Copilul negru ("The Black Child"), and had been commissioned to write a working-class novel, centered on his fellow stevedores.

[54] Around 1954, Stelaru had joined an informal "literary circle" of social drinkers, which included Ion Vlad, poet Tiberiu Iliescu, actor Ludovic Antal, journalist Emil Serghie, philosopher Sorin Pavel, and, more marginally, Pandrea.

[56] Stelaru had proposed another book of rhyming stories, called Leru, but in November 1957 the Agitprop Directorate picked up on details which seemingly mocked the regime, and advised against its publication.

[38] Formally unemployed throughout his stay in Turnu Măgurele (which lasted to 1965), Stelaru was isolated from the professional community, only receiving letters from Corlaciu and painter Ioan Mirea; he was also legally barred from obtaining a ration book.

[66] In his reception of Oameni și flăcări, communist poet Camil Baltazar noted that Stelaru was confiding his "somber" style to describing Romania's capitalist past, while seeking to find an optimistic tone for the "luminous present", though still lacking definition and concision.

[70] Also appearing in 1967, Mare incognitum, which he conceived as a definitive edition, was hailed as the "most important" document of Stelaru's career;[70] though its near-definitive form had been approximated, under a working title, in 1958,[54] it also includes many new poems.

[73] Interviewed by the younger poet Adrian Păunescu in early 1969, when he was already gravely ill with cirrhosis[32] and collecting disability pension,[5][74] Stelaru noted the "spiritual liberty" of Romania's literary scene, but expressed his disdain for the Onirists, who, he argued, had "jumped overboard".

[76] Stoica reconnected with his mentor at this stage: feeling like a rich man in a "golden palace", and "won over by the charms of family life", Stelaru could now pay for his own upkeep, and could afford prestige goods, such as Pepsi, Pall Mall, and foreign medicine.

[79] As a writer, Stelaru followed up in 1969 with a second print of Mare incognitum (prefaced by Lucian Raicu), and another fairy tale, Cei din lună ("Those of the Moon"); and in 1970 with two more volumes: Înalta umbră ("The Tall Shadow"), and Poeme dramatice.

She argued that, while Tonegaru, Corlaciu and Dumitrescu had always displayed concern for the future, and prescience about a coming doom, Stelaru was "stuck within his one howl, the one he started with", a "vehement, obsessive, but dimming repetition of his beginnings."

[81] Diarist Pericle Martinescu described Doi lei planeta as a highly mendacious book, but noted that such was to be expected of Stelaru, since "the poet never held an ounce of literary conscience.

Martin, who delivered Stelaru's funeral oration, believes that he was an "occasional guru" to the younger Nichita Stănescu, whose own poetry is similarly tapped into a "bohemianism of the spiritual elites.

"[32] As noted by literary scholar Victor Corcheș, his legacy was otherwise tarnished: "like other men of letters, I once fell victim to a prejudice that saw [Stelaru] the poet as an angel, and the man as a demon!

It was much later that I realized [...] that his existence as a man, lavishly peppered with dramatic or hilarious facts of life, was sublimated by his literary output, with his social avatars blending into a spiritual creation.

[89] The staff of Radio Free Europe continued to regard Stelaru as primarily an anti-communist resistant, but their arguments were challenged from within Romania by a Luceafărul columnist, Artur Silvestri.