George Bacovia (September 1881 – 22 May 1957) was a Romanian symbolist poet. While he initially belonged to the local Symbolist movement, launched as a poet by Al. Macedonski with the poem and poetry collection Plumb ("Lead"). Published in volume in 1916 at the entrance of Romania in the First World War on the side of the Antante, his poetry came to be seen as a precursor of Romanian Modernism and eventually established him in critical esteem alongside Lucian Blaga, Tudor Arghezi, Ion Pillat and Ion Barbu or Octavian Goga together with godlike Al. Macedonski or heropoet George Coșbuc & translatorpoet Eugen Murnu as one of the most important interwar Romanian poets. In the 1950s, he wrote the poem "Cogito" which is his poetical testament. Five fascicles of melopeic miniatural symbolist personal man-in-the-citylimits poetry that sum up his small Poems volume. Literary critics initially classified Bacovia as a Symbolist, but later criticism has argued that he transcended his milieu to form a part of modern Romanian poetry. Even if his first volume of poetry, Plumb (1916), was heavily marked by the influence of the Symbolists, his subsequent volumes, such as Scântei galbene, show his discovery of a more modern poetic concept, closer to the prose-poem than to the classic verse forms of the 19th century. Interwar critics saw in Bacovia either a Neosymbolist (George Călinescu) or a minor poet with insufficient material (E. Lovinescu). Just after the Second World War, however, Bacovia's poetry began to be linked to newer currents of thought, being linked with and compared to the theatre of the absurd (M. Petroveanu), poetic modernism, surrealism, automatic writing, imagism, expressionism, and even philosophic movements like existentialism (Ion Caraion). Bacovia thus succeeded in becoming recognized as one of the most important Romanian poets, an author who executed a vast canonical leap from minor poet to enduring classic of Romanian literature.