The communication offers a hermeneutical analysis of the forms of representation of the reluctance in the work of Nicolae Esinencu - "man - show", "poet-scandal". Particularly productive in all literary genres, he brings out unmatched pages and images, airing the patterned and canonized ideas of socialist realism, which he seems not to have heard. The terriblisms becoming for Esinencu a factor of self-protection in an ostracizing society. The concept of reluctance in the work is distinguished by the author's adoption of irony as a principle of textual production, becoming an iconoclastic reaction to the totalitarian ideological regime. The Esinencian game diverges the inflation of the anecdotal and the bravado with the masks of vulnerability, the irony being consumed in the sentimental key. Another type of reticence is used by the writer at the sudden semantic turn of the second or last verse of the poem. These strategies are meant to invite the reader to "dream up". The grotesque, the absurd and the farce, the interweaving of sarcasm and sentimentality supervised, become some of the channels of the writer leading in the subtext; their fugitive surprise and punctuation, of different sensations, emotions and thoughts, have the purpose of triggering the data of reality.