He was a Neo-Romantic early in his poetic career; he was also a part of the so-called Odessa School of Russian writers (which also included Isaak Babel, Yuri Olesha, Valentin Katayev, Vera Inber, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, among others).

Born Eduard Godelevich Dzyubin (Russian: Эдуа́рд Гео́ргиевич Дзю́бин, IPA: [ˈdzʲʉbʲɪn] ⓘ; Ukrainian: Дзю́бін) in Odessa to a Jewish middle-class family, most of his creative career took place in Moscow.

Isaak Babel, for example, planned to write a screenplay based on Bagritsky's long poem Archived 2017-02-14 at the Wayback Machine "Duma about Opanas" (the script was never finished and was eventually lost).

His worldview was extremely unsentimental, and earned him much invective from detractors from all sides who saw his poetry as vindictive toward both his Jewish origins and the host Russian culture.

[2] Bagritsky who had been suffering from bronchial asthma from childhood died form complications due to pneumonia in Moscow in 1934, aged 38.