Born in Bucharest in 1854, Macedonski began publishing as a teenager and founded the magazine Literatorul in 1880. A leading figure in bringing Symbolism into Romanian poetry, he wrote on beauty, dreams, melancholy and the gap between ideal and real, and was fascinated by poetry as music, above all in his rondels. Often controversial and isolated, he is now seen as the bridge from Romanian Romanticism to modern poetry. He died in 1920.
