Aron Cotruş

Aron Cotruș (Romanian pronunciation: [aˈron koˈtruʃ]; 2 January 1891 - 1 November 1961) was a Romanian poet and diplomat who also supported the Iron Guard.

He attended secondary school at Blaj, at the "Andrei Saguna" in Brasov and the Faculty of Letters in Vienna, and was part of the nationalist newspaper ""Românul" (Arad) and "Gazeta de Transilvania" (Brasov), but had and collaborations with cultural magazines "Gândirea", "Vremea", "Libertatea" (Orăștie), "Iconar" (Cernăuți) and others. Critic Al. T. Stamatiad described Cotruş as young Transylvania's "most talented poet".

During World War I he was in Italy, where he worked under the Romanian Legation in Rome. After the war, in 1919, he returned to Romania, becoming a journalist in Arad. A royalist, he later became a supporter of Ion Antonescu. After the death of Queen Marie of Romania he wrote the important poem "Maria Doamna" (“Lady Marie”), in which, in the words of Lucian Boia, "the queen appears as a providential figure come from faroff shores to infuse the Romanian nation with a new force."

He also became a member of the Romanian Writers' Society. He worked as a press attaché in Rome, Warsaw, and during the Second World War as a press secretary in Madrid and Lisbon. Along with Titus Vifor and Vintilă Horia he was assigned by the Iron Guard's "National Legionary State" to run the Romanian Propaganda Office in Rome, "The Fellowship of the Cross" .

After the collapse of the Antonescu regime he became a political refugee in Franco's Spain and became the president of the exiled Romanian community, then editor of the pro-Guardist magazine "Carpathians", published in Madrid. In 1957 he settled in the United States at Long Beach, California, where he lived for the rest of his life. He died in La Mirada, California on November 1, 1961. His remains are in Holy Cross Cemetery, Cleveland, under a simple stone plaque.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry describes him as a writer "whose messianic thunderings were couched in rolling free verse and a racy, sonorous vocabulary." Along with Emil Isac, he opposed a neo-romantic and "prophetic" attitude borrowed from Octavian Goga. In Cotruș's case, this took the form of an ethno-nationalist discourse about "the ethnic and social battles of the Romanians".

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