Demetriade's work, which mainly consists of lyric poetry and verse drama with fantasy elements, was often included in the National Theater Bucharest programs; however, critics and historians have dismissed it as a rather minor contribution to Romanian literature.

During the 1880s, he cultivated the friendships of writers Vasile Alecsandri and Bonifaciu Florescu, editing Analele Literare, a magazine which mixed Symbolist activism and literary scholarship.

[5] In 1880, he appeared alongside his sister and (on his retiring performance) his father, in a production for the National Theater Bucharest; the chosen play was Victor Séjour's "Outlaw of the Adriatic", and he had the title role.

[1] According to his colleague and biographer N. Davidescu, Demetriade was also an avid reader of literary theory by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and René Ghil, constantly at work refining and modernizing his own art.

[16] In December 1884, Demetriade was a founding member of the Bucharest Social Studies Circle, with Alexandru G. Radovici and Constantin Mille, wherein he also represented a Masonic Lodge (named after Mircea Rosetti).

[17] With the National Theater troupe, including his sister and Constantin Nottara, Demetriade toured the Romanian-speaking regions of the Duchy of Bukovina, Austria-Hungary, during summer 1885.

[24] In its first issues, Analele Literare also hosted Demetriade debut play, În noaptea nunții ("On Their Wedding Night"),[25] called a "weak comedy" by the traditionalist Nicolae Iorga.

[26] In addition to the Literatorul (or Revista Literară), he also published in the various Macedonskian satellite reviews, from Iuliu Cezar Săvescu and Florescu's Dumineca[27] to Petroff's Hermes.

[30] After În noaptea nunții, which was to be premiered at the National Theater in 1900,[31] Demetriade focused mainly on versified plays which were picturesque and had a fairy-tale ambience: Făt-Frumos ("Prince Charming"), 1889; Renegatul ("The Renegade"), 1893; Opere dramatice ("Works in Drama"), 1905.

[34] Demetriade's other poems were rhetorical, the imagery and themes romantic and Baudelairean; their subjects included demonism, genius, spiritual ascension and melancholy ("spleen").

[5] His more experimental pieces included the 1906 sonnet Sonuri și culori ("Sounds and Colors"), which was heavily indebted to Rimbaud's synaesthesia, assigning deeper meanings to isolated vowels.

[35] Such work, often eroticized, received a radical critique from the traditionalist intellectuals of Transylvania: a reviewer for Rĕvașul newspaper, claiming to speak for his entire region, called Demetriade's "orgiastic" poems "an ugly torrent".

[41] The younger Symbolist Mihail Cruceanu, who met Demetriade in Macedonski's salon in 1905, recalls him as a "Mefisto", who readily imparted his erotic escapades with the Literatorul crowd.

[48] In tandem, Demetriade began collaborating with Macedonski at his right-wing reviews Forța Morală and Liga Conservatoare, using such pen names as Ali-Baba, Demir, Dimir, and D.

[51] In April 1910, Demetriade became a founding member of the Society of Theatrical Authors,[52] and, in 1911, was employed by the National Theater as a dramaturge, correcting and updating Rhea Sylvia, by Nicolae Scurtescu.

[54] Both writers also shared similar ideas on heredity: Demetriade's claim that syphilis could act as a "civilizing hero", by favoring intellectual traits in syphilitic descendants, prompted Sterian to construct an elaborate evolutionary theory.

His lifelong output included over fifteen hundred poems, plays, translations and articles of literary criticism (the most significant of which appeared in Românul Literar), mainly uncollected in book form.