As a youth, he extended his protest to the cultural establishment as a whole—while visiting the high school in Ploieşti, where he was supposed to address the staff, he attacked local educational institutions for "taking care to castrate [...] the glands of any outright affirmation", and for resembling "the Bastille". In his early prose poems, Bogza addressed workers in the oil industry in his native Prahova, claiming to define himself in relation to their work (while still appealing to the imagery of filth). The series has been defined by critic Constantin Stănescu as poems "rehabilitating, among other things, the compromised «genre» of the social poem". One such piece, published in 1929 and titled "Poem cu erou" ("Poem with a Hero"), documented the unusual death of a roughneck named Nicolae Ilie, who burned after his clothes caught fire. The incident was discussed in the press of his day, and the poet is credited with having personally aided in publicizing it. Bogza allegorically spoke of feeling "the "țuică" and pumpkin-like" smell of Nicolae Ilie's feces "every time I raise a loaf of bread or a mug of milk to my mouth". He wrote: