Vasile Voiculescu remains in Romanian literature as an authentic religious poet

[…] I am still obsessed – and my obsession should be shared by all – by the harrowing scene described to me by a witness to the poet’s last years: old, ill, in an unheated room, in the middle of the Bucharest winter, V. Voiculescu received a visit from Tudor Vianu, who came to persuade him to allow some of his poems to be published under the current regime. Tudor Vianu wanted to persuade the poet of Destiny to finally give up the asceticism (the aesthete called it stubbornness) in which he had ostentatiously wallowed. V. Voiculescu looked deeply into the eyes of the very thoughtful man and said such a resounding, hard “no” that the tempter had to leave quickly, very quickly. […]

V. Voiculescu remains in Romanian literature above all as an authentic religious poet. This fact is not only important, but also somewhat new, because up to him and some of the poets of thought, we find a conceptual and not a lived religion. Grigore Alexandrescu talks to his “spirit”, Eminescu is before God, but not with the fear of God, Panait Cerna tries the substantial rhetoric of approach, but that is all. […]

For the poet V. Voiculescu, faith is a natural and living way of being, a given. In a confession read to students at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest and published in Gândirea[1], he states this clearly:

“Faithfulness, he says, is of the same moral nature as character. In what biological and psychological structures these spiritual structures of faithfulness and unfaithfulness are embedded, I do not know if it will ever be known. I confess that these things are my fantasies, though I feel or sense that they are very real”. And further: “Gentlemen, I have no merit to believe, I was born this way! I look into my past and find no encounter that would silently lead me to faith, no misfortune that would turn me upside down, no suffering that would turn me inside out like a glove, no alchemical fire that would melt me and then transform me into another metal. If I have sometimes tried to believe, I have done so quietly, for I often forget to breathe when I am bent over work. But suddenly, without my knowledge or will, the need for air makes my chest expand again. I was born, I think, a devout man, organically devout, and I dare say devout even if I were not religious. God is easy for those who catch him at once”.

This catching up with God at once, but also this serene daily life with God, is much easier within the limits of our Orthodoxy. A “merciful heart”, as a Holy Father of the East would say, the poet Voiculescu lives to the full, “a heart that burns for every creature, for men, birds, animals, demons and all creation”. The love of the creature and of the Creator through the creature – in Orthodoxy there is a real hierarchy of dogmas – the poet lives it fully in a landscape in which our folkloric myths weave and interweave.

However, integration into the spirit of Orthodoxy does not erase any murmurings, if not stirrings, in the poet’s being. The struggle never takes on the aspect of a drama. It evades the problem and the silence. Voiculescu’s work is a kind of sweating harmony, it doesn’t burn any steps, it doesn’t shy away from a real cycle of spiritual growth. […] 

I had the good fortune to read – with a shudder – a manuscript volume by V. Voiculescu, a work conceived in the years before his imprisonment. In these unpublished works, the persuasive perspective I mentioned leads to an already famous conclusion. V. Voiculescu abandons the last concessions that any poet makes to the poem in order to appropriate the rhythm of prayer itself. A kind of spiritual breath removes any aesthetic “sin” from the poem, so that everything is ordered in a kneeling manner. The poem is truly pulverised to become “a precipice of humility”, as St. Isaac the Syrian would say.

(Virgil Ierunca – Românește, Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2005, pp. 40-44)

[1] Year XIV, no. 8, October 1935, pp. 400-405