Born in Moldavia in 1850 and educated in Cernăuți, Vienna and Berlin, Eminescu lived a short, unsettled life as librarian, journalist and editor, and was gravely ill in his final years; he died in 1889. His poems join love, loneliness, folklore, nature and history with questions about time, death and eternity, as in Luceafărul. He is the defining voice of Romanian poetry and shaped the modern Romanian literary language.
