ABSTRACT. The present article attempts to explore the transition of Romanian love poetry from Classicism and Romanticism towards Modernism – marked by the influence of German Expressionism and a rich folkloric legacy – as performed by a representative literary figure of interwar culture, namely Lucian Blaga, portrayed in his hypostases as poet, philosopher, and aesthetician. Starting from the poet’s ideas of metaphor and modern poetic myth, love appears as the totalizing cosmic element in a life–death dialectics, harmonized by the feminine principle. This complex feeling is depicted in its materiality as well as its superior dimension of ideality, corresponding to different stages in Blaga’s creation.

Keywords: Lucian Blaga; Romanian modernism; Eros; metaphor