Lucian Blaga (1895-1961) is judged by many to be Romania's most original philosopher and greatest poet of the twentieth century. While scholars with access to his works in Romanian are well aware of their importance, his work has remained, up to now, little known in the English-speaking world. Blaga the poet is inextricably bound up with Blaga the philosopher. He always insisted that he wrote poetry in response to a deep creative impulse yet it is equally true that Blaga pursued similar goals in philosophy: to uncover the meaning of existence and to account for man's place in the universe.