director of the review Ateneu cultural, and published his book of poetry Scântei galbene (Yellow sparks) at his own expense. In the same year Bucăți de noapte (Night fragments) appeared in an edition edited by the poet Agatha Grigorescu. In 1926 he returned to the Boys' Commercial School and continued to teach drawing and calligraphy. In 1928, Bacovia married Agatha Grigorescu, editor of Bucăți de noapte, and settled in Bucharest, where his wife was a teacher. In 1929, he republished Plumb and Scântei galbene in a single edition, entitled Poezii and produced by Editura Ancora; soon after, the dormant review Orizonturi noi resumed publication under his direction. He gained a post as an inspector at the Ministry of Popular Education, but after the publication of his collection Cu voi (With you), he returned with his wife to Bacău, where he spent three years unemployed. In 1931, Agatha gave birth to Bacovia's only son, Gabriel; in 1932, the Romanian Society of Writers approved a monthly pension of 1,000 lei. The family returned to Bucharest permanently in 1933, never to move away again. In 1934, Bacovia published an anthology of his poems entitled Poezii; in 1940, his pension increased to 2,000 lei per month. He then founded the House of Pensions for Writers, from which he subsequently drew a 10,000 lei monthly pension. In 1944 his Opere (Works) appeared, a collection including all of his previously published works. After the war In 1945 Bacovia was named librarian of the Ministry of Mines and Oil. He continued to write, and in 1946 published the volume Stanțe burgheze (literally translated into English Bourgeois Stanzas), which led to his hiring by the Ministry of the Arts. In 1956 he published his final volume of Poezii before dying on the afternoon of 22 May 1957 in his Bucharest residence. Critical reception Literary critics initially classified Bacovia as a Symbolist, but later criticism has argued that he transcended his milieu to form a part of modern Romanian poetry. Even if his first volume of poetry, Plumb (1916), was heavily marked by the influence of the Symbolists, his subsequent volumes, such as Scântei galbene, show his discovery of a more modern poetic concept, closer to the prose-poem than to the classic verse forms of the 19th century. Interwar critics saw in Bacovia either a Neosymbolist (George Călinescu) or a minor poet with insufficient material (Eugen Lovinescu). Just after