stylistic:style_transfer, quality:corruption
Symbolist poetry

Tzara's earliest Symbolist poems, published in Simbolul during 1912, were later rejected by their author, who asked Sașa Pană not to include them in editions of his works. The influence of French Symbolists on the young Samyro was particularly important, and surfaced in both his lyric and prose poems. Attached to Symbolist musicality at that stage, he was indebted to his Simbolul colleague Ion Minulescu and the Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck. Philip Beitchman argues that "Tristan Tzara is one of the writers of the twentieth century who was most profoundly influenced by symbolism—and utilized many of its methods and ideas in the pursuit of his own artistic and social ends." However, Cernat believes, the young poet was by then already breaking with the syntax of conventional poetry, and that, in subsequent experimental pieces, he progressively stripped his style of its Symbolist elements.

During the 1910s, Samyro experimented with Symbolist imagery, in particular with the "hanged man" motif, which served as the basis for his poem Se spânzură un om ("A Man Hangs Himself"), and which built on the legacy of similar pieces authored by Christian Morgenstern and Jules Laforgue. Se spânzură un om was also in many ways similar to ones authored by his collaborators Adrian Maniu (Balada spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Ballad") and Vinea (Visul spânzuratului, "The Hanged Man's Dream"): all three poets, who were all in the process of discarding Symbolism, interpreted the theme from a tragicomic and iconoclastic perspective. These pieces also include Vacanță în provincie ("Provincial Holiday") and the anti-war fragment Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului ("The Storm and the Deserter's Song"), which Vinea published in his Chemarea. The series is seen by Cernat as "the general rehearsal for the Dada adventure." The complete text of Furtuna și cântecul dezertorului was published at a later stage, after the missing text was discovered by Pană. At the time, he became interested in the free verse work of the American Walt Whitman, and his translation of Whitman's epic poem Song of Myself, probably completed before World War I, was published by Alfred Hefter-Hidalgo in his magazine Versuri și Proză (1915).

Beitchman notes that, throughout his life, Tzara used Symbolist elements against the doctrines of Symbolism. Thus, he argues, the poet did not cultivate a memory of historical events, "since it deludes man into thinking that there was something when there was nothing." Cernat notes: "That which essentially unifies, during, the poetic output of Adrian Maniu, Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara is an acute awareness of literary conventions, a satiety in respect to calophile literature, which they perceived as exhausted." In Beitchman's view, the revolt against cultivated beauty was a constant in Tzara's years of maturity, and his visions of social change continued to be inspired by Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont. According to Beitchman, Tzara uses the Symbolist message, "the birthright has been sold for a mess of porridge", taking it "into the streets, cabarets and trains where he denounces the deal and asks for his birthright back."