Princeps Poesis
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Princeps Poesis is the current name of the website you're reading right now and of the project. Its founder is Yigru Zeltil. The project received in 2026 the Gheorghe Iova Award.
The earliest form of the project was a Blogger page made in early 2011, with a post collecting basic information and front covers of less than 50 poetry books published in Romanian throughout 2010. At that time and during the next few years, my page was conceived as a reaction to how Romanian literary critics made yearly retrospective lists where only 3-5 poetry books were ever included each year. Initially, I tried to be selective and only include volumes that may be more or less significant.
Within several years, the project evolved into forming an increasingly broader overview, until I eventually decided that it does not make any more sense to try doing gatekeeping, so it became a free-for-all - no notability standards (due to which Romanian editors of Wikipedia unfamiliar with literature have been deleting pages of living authors they deem "non-notable"; conceptual poet Gregor Weichbrodt published an entire book with such examples of power tripping from all across Wikipedia, Dictionary of non-notable artists), open to everyone from academic poets to self-published authors, stereotypically thought to be unimportant, unprofessional, "outsiders".
I reject this hierarchal view based on two influences: Roman Jakobson's theory on how the literary quality of a text is not innate and objectively measurable, but is contextual (one of the consequences being that the canonical status of any given author shifts in time), and Franco Moretti's "distant reading" approach, which takes into consideration as valuable data large quantities of books in any given genre that did not achieve "success" nor received any attention from critics.
The scope of the project expanded further by including not just lyrical poetry, but also adjacent genres, such as children's poetry, dramatic poems, experimental writing, prose poetry, short-form poetic prose, or novels-in-verse.
Lastly, I decided, upon having gathered data on over 50,000 books published in Romanian during the last century, that I want to expand the project towards all poetic languages!
Acknowledgments
Răzvan Țupa Grigore Șoitu Nicu Ilie Nada Tzirre Gordon Iosif-Vladimir Zifceac