The very name of Rumania's most famous poet, Mihai Eminescu, is unknown to all but a very few in the English-speaking world. Here then, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, is an Englishman's tribute to his memory.

Eminescu was born in northern Moldavia in January, 1850, when the exiles of the 1848 revolution were beginning to return. The previous decade had seen the rapid spread of Western ideas among the boyar class of the Principalities, starting with the return from France of the “bonjourists” (a number of young boyars who had been sent to Paris for their education), and culminating in the revolutionary movement of 1848.