couple of times in his books and usually ridiculing him in his articles. One of these texts, the 1886 essay Poeți și critici ("Poets and Critics"), spoke of Macedonski as having "vitiated" poetry, a notion he also applied to Constantin D. Aricescu and Aron Densușianu. Especially radical pronouncements were left by the traditionalist authors Ilarie Chendi and Nicolae Iorga. Chendi wrote of Macedonski being "the caricature of a man", having "a feverish mind" and being motivated by "the brutal instinct of revenge". Iorga, who became better known as a historian, later retracted some of the statements he had made against the poet during the 1890s. Among the younger prominent traditionalist writers was the Transylvanian-born Lucian Blaga, who may have purposefully avoided Macedonski during his first visit to Bucharest in 1920. Although more sympathetic to the Symbolist author, both Dragomirescu and Gheorghe Adamescu tended to describe him as exclusively the product of French and Decadent literature, while Dragomirescu's disciple Ion Trivale denied all merit to Macedonski's literature. According to Tudor Vianu, Macedonski's intellectual friends (among them Anghel Demetriescu, George Ionescu-Gion, Bonifaciu Florescu, Grigore Tocilescu and V. A. Urechia) were largely responsible for passing down "a better and truer image of the abused poet." It was also due to Dragomirescu that Noaptea de decemvrie was included in a literature textbook for final grade high school students, which some argue is the poet's first-ever presence in the Romanian curriculum. According to historian Lucian Nastasă, the poet's wife Ana Rallet behaved like an "excellent secretary" while Macedonski was still alive, and thereafter helped sort and edit his manuscript while maintaining "an actual cult" for her husband. Macedonski's cosmopolitan circle was the center of a literary alternative to the prevailing conservatism and Eminescu-like traditionalism of the day, the latter tendency being grouped around Sămănătorul magazine for part of Macedonski's lifetime. While Macedonski himself maintained his links with Romanticism and Classicism, commentators have retrospectively recognized in him the main person who announced Romania's first wave in modernist literature. Many first-generation disciples were to part with his guidelines early on, either by radicalizing their Symbolism or by stepping out of its confines. Traian Demetrescu was one of the first to do so, focusing on his commitment to socialism—Vianu notes that the split took place "without coldness and the heart's versatility" on Macedonski's part. Literary researcher Lidia Bote argues that it was Petică who first illustrated mature Symbolism,