He indicates that, overall, Fondane's contributions confuse critics by following "contradictory directions", a mix that "hardly finds any grounds for comparison within [Romanian] poetry." In contrast, Paul Cernat sees both Fondane's poetry and Ion Călugăru's prose as "Expressionist écorchés", and connects Fondane's "modern attitude" to his familiarity with the poems of Arthur Rimbaud. Avant-garde critique of parochialism The introduction of rhetorical violence within a traditional poetic setting announced Fondane's transition into the more radical wing of the modernist movement. During his Priveliști period, in his articles for Contimporanul, the poet stated that Symbolism was dead, and in subsequent articles drew a line between the original and non-original sides of Romanian Symbolism, becoming particularly critical of Macedonski. Defining his programmatic approach as leading, through the avant-garde, into a Neoclassical modernism (or a "new Classicism"), Benjamin Fondane argued: "To be excessive: that is the only way of being innovative." His perspective, mixing revolt and messages about creating a new tradition, was relatively close to Contimporanuls own artistic program, and as such a variant of Constructivism. During his own transition from Symbolism, Fondane looked on the avant-garde itself with critical distance. Discussing it as the product of a tradition leading back to Stéphane Mallarmé, he reproached Cubism for displaying a limitation of range, and viewed Futurism as essentially destructive (but also useful for having created a virgin territory to support "constructive man"); likewise, he found Dada a solid, but limited, method of combating interwar period's "metaphysical despair". The affiliation to the avant-garde came with a sharp critique of Romanian culture, accused by Fondane of promoting imitation and parochialism. During a period which ended with his 1923 departure, the young poet sparked polemic with a series of statements in which, reviewing the impact of local Francophilia, he equated Romania with a colony of France. This theory proposed a difference between Westernization and "parasitism": "If a foreign intellectual direction is always useful, an alien soul is always a danger." He did not cease to promote foreign culture at home, but stated a complex argument about the need to recognize differences in culture: his global conclusion about civilizations, which he viewed as equal but not identical, built on Gourmont's theory about an "intellectual constancy" throughout human history, as well as on philosopher Henri Bergson's critique of mechanism. In parallel, Fondane criticized the cultural setting of Greater Romania, noting that it was so Bucharest-focused that Transylvanian authors