Pompiliu Eliade

[4] He arrived with grand designs and a serious intent to stage a repertoire of an elevated cultural level, but lacked a practical understanding of the theatre's values and activities.

[6] Eliade's published debut took the form of his undergraduate thesis, inspired by the ideas of Titu Maiorescu: Silogismul și adversarul său Herbert Spencer.

He contributed studies, reviews and columns to Literatură și artă română, Vieața nouă, Revista idealistă and L'Indépendance roumaine.

Condițiunile și limitele acestei arte is a published course that features his interesting theoretical views about literature,[1] in the form of fifteen lectures.

[2] A follower of Maiorescu's aesthetic principles who was shaped by the impressionist, rationalist, historicist school of French criticism, he preferred literary classicism, shying away from romanticism and naturalism.

[10] The critic should follow four steps: the first, external, involves determining whether the work is one of prose or verse, tragic or comic, the impression its language leaves.

Many of his opinions regarding the pre-modern poets have been rendered obsolete by subsequent research: for instance, he did not know that Ienăchiță Văcărescu was familiar with Voltaire, or that Costache Conachi had translated a number of French authors.

(Alexis Piron and Jean-Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, whom he mentions as having influenced this group of writers, in fact had no impact in the Romanian lands.)

He valued Vasile Alecsandri but accused him of falling into a great spiritual void; he was less enthusiastic about Mihail Eminescu because of his loose technique, pessimism and philosophical outlook, but nevertheless placed him between William Shakespeare and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[6] A promoter of Radu D. Rosetti's poetry, he admired the "objective" lyricism of the "classic" and "definitive" Ștefan Octavian Iosif, and was enraptured by Alexandru Vlahuță's România pitorească for its "triumph of reason over the feeble areas of sensibility".