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The lyrical protest of the poets from the war generation exhibits a wide range of complexity. In their programmatically expressed desire to depart from the literary tradition, from the poetical canon of the period, the rebel poets make use of an arsenal of techniques and procedures through which they denounce the literature of the moment. Their target is poetry in particular, which is accused of being fake and sterile, of betraying its original mission, as a rotten fruit of an aesthetics of the literariness, devoid of substance, and of a factitious vision, tributary to the tradition and to the patterns of the aesthetics of the time. In the complex range of the new aesthetic attitude, defiance, bohemian attitude and evasion are fundamental modes of the lyrical protest, developed by the representative poets of the war generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "war generation", also known as the "lost generation", marks a moment of rupture in Romanian literature, by denouncing the literary tradition and the aesthetic canons and by the wish to renew it. A particular case of the "lost generation" is Ion Caraion. The poet expresses a structural existential apostasy, an aesthetic revolt, historically circumscribed, and an iconoclastic attitude toward everything "old" and "outdated" in existence, mentality, and literature, in the name of the new and of the future, driven by messianic ideals. In resounding manifesto texts and fulminant poems, he pleads for the separation from tradition, for an aesthetic revolution, for the new literature, for a new poetry, inspired from the original sources of existence, close to the genuine and intense life, for authenticity and originality. In his conception of literature context, under the auspices of the "new poetry", Caraion writes poetry of defiance, defying, in this way, the poetry in "traditional" vision. Through his poetic work under the sign of rebellion and renewal, but also through his tragic existence, Ion Caraion is an exemplary poet of the "lost generation". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]