His interest in music was replaced with a poetic calling: stylistically, Neculuță followed a tradition upheld by Mihai Eminescu and George Coșbuc, which he infused with the tenets of Marxism and his own experience of acute poverty.

In parallel, he established his profile as a "poet-activist" for the Social Democratic Workers' Party and its more radically progressive faction, spending his final years as a co-chair of the România Muncitoare in Bucharest.

During the interwar, he was celebrated by the legal Social Democrats and Socialist Laborites, as well as by the underground Romanian Communist Party; his cultivation sometimes drew suspicion from Romania's right-wing governments.

The literary community remains divided between those who regard Neculuță as a genuine poet, who was overvalued for political reasons, and those who dismiss him as mediocre and argue that his reputation was entirely fabricated.

Some sources suggest that they were both poor peasants,[2][3][4][5] though, according to biographer Mihu Dragomir, this is an erroneous information originating with Neculuță's confidant, Alecu Constantinescu, who misunderstood references to his friend's more distant rural background.

[6][7] A similar confusion surrounds the issue of Dumitru's original surname, with some sources noting that he was first registered with his matronymic, a Ciubotăriții or Aciubotăriții, literally "of the cobbler's wife".

"[6] The boy was passionate about music and had hopes of becoming a violinist; the circumstances of his birth made it impossible that he would afford tuition,[10] and instead he was pushed to earn a living from age ten, working as a shoemaker's apprentice.

Uninterested in the Symbolist movement, he read from Eminescu and the classics of poetry—including Homer, Virgil, and William Shakespeare; he also knew the prose of realists such as Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola.

[13] His works were generally inspired by Eminescu and George Coșbuc, but, as communist poet Dan Deșliu writes, they also had distinct echoes from left-liberal and socialist poets—Cezar Bolliac, Dimitrie Bolintineanu, Traian Demetrescu, and Alexandru Vlahuță.

While acknowledging the "gaucherie" of various such compositions, Deșliu highlights their overall primordialism in a Marxist setting: "Before Neculuță's time—and even for a long time after him—the most gifted poets of social rebellion worked with vague terms, with generalized and imprecise notions: people, justice, liberty, truth etc.

"[18] Kiss further describes Neculuță as stylistically accomplished: "the most difficult and demanding verse forms, primarily the sonnet, but also other, complicated stanza formulas, right up to the tune of folk songs.

"[11] Moving to Bucharest, the national capital, "toward the turn of the century", Neculuță joined the newly formed Social Democratic Workers' Party of Romania (PSDMR), becoming its "poet-activist".

[14] Journalist Leontin Iliescu, who met him upon his arrival, recalls that Neculuță only had 4 lei on him, all of which he spent on a ticket to see Jan Kubelík play; that night, he bunked with a friend, the sculptor Filip Marin.

Such conditions undermined his family life: he was married to a Bucharest woman, but divorced her after six years, thereafter dedicating himself entirely to political work, "one of the most educated and consistent fighters of the Romanian proletariat.

[19] Overall, Neculuță remained loyal to the Marxist faction led by I. C. Frimu following an 1899 split in the movement—a "revolutionary appeal" he published that year, called Spre țărmul dreptății ("Toward the Shores of Justice"), implicitly condemned PSDMR centrists (known as the "generous ones").

[23] By 1901, he and fellow shoemaker Valerian Prescurea were among the most active members of Munca society, which, from its offices on Bucharest's Vamei Street, supported the PSDMR's reestablishment, recruiting intellectuals such as C. Z. Buzdugan and Iosif Nădejde.

"[28] Shared elements include a "grave internal melody", the "unmitigated pain of experience", and "crude", quasi-Imagist, depictions of ravens and crows, or insistence on the metaphoric qualities of metals such as lead (for both poets) and zinc (favored by Neculuță).

"[28] "Impoverished and lamented by the proletariat as a whole",[29] the poet died at his one-room home on Bucharest's Ștefan cel Mare Highway shortly after his 46th birthday (on October 17, 1904, in New Style dates).

[18] An inventory carried out on the day of Neculuță's death records that he only owned an iron bed and mattress, a table, a coat hanger, a coffer filled with books, one shirt, plates, and some other items.

In March 1908, a Gorj County activist was held in custody for distributing Neculuță's poems, alongside pamphlets by Christian Rakovsky, Toma Dragu, and Peter Kropotkin.

[37] Neculuță's volume was also circulated in Austria-Hungary by the Social Democratic Party of Hungary and its Romanian section, which recommended it as "not [to be] left out of any enlightened worker's personal library".

"[29] The young writer-typographer Ion Pas, who was inducted by the socialist movement "just seven years after Neculuță's death", recalled that Vasile Anagnoste, who had "worked with him in the same shop", instructed younger workers to "maintain his cult.

"[41] Deșliu similarly claims that "bourgeois criticism and historiography [...] weaved around Neculuță's work that familiar conspiracy of silence", leaving socialist gatherings as the only venue which still cultivated his verse.

[44] On the 20th commemoration of Neculuță's death on October 7, 1924, a "great number of workers and intellectuals" visited the socialist club on Brezoianu Street to pay homage; police agents reportedly encircled the hall, and only allowed attendees to leave at midnight.

[62] The 50-year commemoration of Neculuță's death was marked by the Writers' Union of Romania with an official ceremony: Dragomir gave a lecture, while Demostene Botez and Ioanichie Olteanu read out from Spre țărmul.

[63] The following year, critic George Ivașcu wrote about Neculuță's inclusion in the high school curriculum as an "act of justice toward a writer of working-class origin and—precisely for that reason—chased out of all bourgeois schoolbooks.

[28] Țoiu believes that Neculuță's posthumous downfall mainly happened because the new communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, loathed poems which reminded him of his own shoemaker's training.

[30] In 1984, literary scholar Al. Dobrescu argued that poets such as Neculuță and Panait Cerna only had "informative value", and that students could be excused for not memorizing their works, whereas "it is mandatory that they be trained to read any poem by Eminescu".

[75] Following the anti-communist rebellion of December, Neculuță and other socialist writers underwent further reassessment, with literary historian Matei Călinescu calling the previous trend "aberrant": "in poetry, for instance, alongside Eminescu, and at some point even above him, they worked to establish the reputation of the 'cobbler-poet' D. Th.

[77] Revisiting Neculuță's poetry after hearing it recited by his barber, Țoiu commented that he was primarily a "decent shoemaker" and "unfortunate people's bard", who never warranted "the sort of revulsion, of aversion, that I felt toward the dictator.