Radu Vancu, Myths and mythoids in Mircea Ivănescu’s Poetry
Myths and mythoids in Mircea Ivănescu’s Poetry
My case study is represented by the poetry of Mircea Ivănescu, as I presume it embodies the most adequate example of a paradoxical condition: while it pretends to be a biographical and secularized annotation of the everyday life of the everyman, it nevertheless dissimulates a deep mythical structure, composed of remnants of ancient myths combined with recent cultural myths, mostly received via Anglo-Saxon (and also French and German, even though in a lesser extent) cultural channels. The presence of this „mythoids” has been noticed before, at least by Alexandru Cistelecan (in his Mircea Ivănescu monograph from 2003) and by myself, in my study on Mircea Ivănescu from 2007, but no extensive study has been made on the nature, structure, and function of this mythical underframe. The conclusions drawn from the case of Mircea Ivănescu’s poetry could be extended afterwards for the most interesting cases of Romanian recent poetry – since it experiences an even more acute discrepancy between the apparent secularization of the world and the formation of new mythical and spiritual structures (the New Age spirituality, mainly – but not exclusively) which poetry has to react with.
Keywords: contemporary Romanian poetry, sacred and poetry, biographism and myths, mythical underframes, Mircea Ivănescu
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