Cerna's early name, rendered in Bulgarian as Панайот Станчов, was commonly transliterated into Romanian as Panait Stanciov, Stancov, Stanciof or Stancioff.

[2][3] By Cerna's own account, his childhood was marked by acute poverty and social isolation: "[I was] told to tutor and learn in cold, unfriendly rooms.

[3] Cerna debuted as a poet in 1897, at the age of sixteen, when his Trecutul ("The Past")—an adaptation of a piece by Nikolaus Lenau—was published in George Coşbuc's Foaia Interesantă magazine.

[9] Cerna spent much of this period traveling through the Old Kingdom, and several times visited regions of the Southern Carpathians, in particular the area of Rucăr, the Bucegi Mountains, and the Jiu Valley.

[9] Cerna's love of rural life, together with what Călinescu describes as a "social preoccupation", made him an outspoken opponent of the way in which the authorities handled the peasant uprising of 1907.

[15] From late 1910 to early 1912, Cerna was at the University of Leipzig, where he attended courses held by the philosophers and psychologists Wilhelm Wundt, Eduard Spranger and Hans Volkelt.

[16] Panait Cerna's first volume of collected poetry was published at home in 1910, and, two years later, resulted in the author being made a co-recipient of the Romanian Academy's Vasile Adamachi Award.

[3] Cerna was a traditionalist poet, listed by Călinescu among the contributors to Romanian literature whose work "steers toward classicism", as do those of Dragomirescu, Mehedinţi, Henri Sanielevici, D. Nanu, Ion Trivale, Cincinat Pavelescu, Corneliu Moldovanu, Mihail Codreanu, Alexandru Davila and George Murnu.

[6][20] Literary historian Tudor Vianu notes the influence exercised on Cerna and other traditionalists by Mihai Eminescu, Romania's major mid-19th-century classicist and Junimist poet.

Titled Plânsetul lui Adam, it builds on themes which recalled Byron's 1821 play Cain, and constituted an interrogation of divine laws.

"[26] Among the writings forming the subject of this disagreement was Cerna's Din depărtare ("From Far Away"), which Lovinescu believed was marked by the use of repetitive and banal poetic images:

Nu ţi-am vorbit vrodată, şi pe fereşti deschise Nu ţi-am trimis buchete, stăpâna mea din vise, Ci numai de departe te-am urmărit adese, Iluminat de gânduri nespuse, ne-nţelese ...[22] I never spoke with you, and through open windows I never sent you bouquets, mistress of my dreams, But merely have been often watching you from afar, Illuminated by untold, unknown words The subject of unrequited love was one of the major ones in Cerna's lyric poems and, Călinescu argues, it evoked his actual experience with women, as "the regret of not having lived through the great mystery of love.

"[9] These pieces, the critic notes, point to the influence of classicist authors such as Eminescu, Dante Aligheri, and Giacomo Leopardi (the latter poet had also been quoted in Cerna's Die Gedankenlyrik).

Cărarea mea subţire se umple de lumină, Încât mă-mpac cu viaţa-mi şi uit că-mi eşti străină.

While rejecting Cerna's conceptual approach, Lovinescu admired his style, for "the amplitude through which [the sentiment] is laid out in vast chimes and compact constructions of rhetorical stanzas.

[22] For George Călinescu, Cerna's "euphoric thirst for life" recalled the work of Parnassian and Symbolist author Alexandru Macedonski, but was tempered by "the mellow anemia of the phthisic.

Noi ne-am cuprins de-o flacără curată, Ce niciodată n-are să apuie - Şi nu furăm norocul nimănuie, Ci în iubire tânără, bogată, Îmbrăţişăm pământul, lumea toată.

Usucă iute câmpurile roşii, Să nu priceapă-n groapa lor strămoşii Al cui a fost - şi cine l-a vărsat.

Panait Cerna's lifetime success and literary fame made him the target of adulation among his fellow traditionalists, a camp which united various Junimea affiliates and Sămănătorul contributors.

[7] Mehedinţi's 1914 account of the Junimist promotion of the "original manifestations of Romanian culture" listed Cerna alongside Alexandru G. Florescu and other minor writers.

[27] Also according to Ornea, the association with Dragomirescu was also characteristic for the Junimist twilight, given that this circle had failed to impose "a new literary direction", and was tributary to the legacy of various traditionalist groups.

[16] The poet's adoption of a mainstream approach to poetry also pleased his public, and, Călinescu notes, schoolbooks of the day celebrated him as a Romanian classic while completely ignoring more controversial Symbolists such as Macedonski and Dimitrie Anghel.

Among them are the socialist Alexandru Toma,[29] later known as an official poet of Communist Romania, and Sămănătorul's Ion Sân-Giorgiu,[30] whose career later took him through an Expressionist stage and eventually to fascist politics.

In his essay Din registrul ideilor gingaşe ("From the Register of Gentle Ideas"), where he satirizes the Romanian public's reception of literature, Zarifopol looks into the problems faced by Cerna in satisfying his readers.

Using one of Cerna's own accounts as the basis for this analysis, he notes that a group of his young "female admirers" where unpleasantly surprised to find out that their idol was "short, pudgy, wide-necked and ruddy-faced.