The article provides an overview of the reception of Uku Masing as a poet from the 1930s through the Soviet occupation and up to this day. A closer analysis is dedicated to the reasons, formation and later development of the stereotypes manifested in the critics' attitudes. Due to the lack of freedom of speech, the rule of censorship and the disfavour of religious life in the Soviet Union contact with Masing's religious poetry remained scarce and fragmentary. All this conduced to critics' estrangement as well as a considerable distance between Masing's poetic works and their possible Estonian reader. In different periods Uku Masing has evoked various interpretations and judgements on the critics' part. He has been seen not only as a rustic self-hypnotic spell-chanter, but also as an exotic and really special mysticist poet; moreover, he has been called a sophisticated genius, a marginal philosopher and eccentric, even a prophet. The author here attempts to find out the reasons behind those different visions. Extensive publication of Uku Masing's poetry since the year 2000 faces Estonian scholars of literature with a new challenge: they should now re-interpret the role of the poets called arbujad 'diviners' in the Estonian poetry. The poems written by Uku Masing should be restored to their rightful place as the axis of the "diviners'" poetry.
