Hungary is the nation of poets. It belongs to those cultures where lyrical poetry in their esthetic value accomplished much more then prose and drama. Since poetry is closer to the language in which it was born then any other work of art these cultures have a more difficult time to make their national treasures known on the stages of world literature then those cultures that have the luxury to boast about the oeuvre of great novelists and playwrights.

For Hungarian readers Attila József is among the greatest. His name is mentioned together with the names of Bálint Balassi, Mihály Vörösmarty, Sándor Petőfi, János Arany and Endre Ady who are regarded as the leading poets of Hungary. For foreign readers these poets are absolutely not more familiar then Attila József himself. This is why it’s probably not considered prejudice if we measure this not well known Hungarian lyricist with other, great, well known European poets of his era. The names of Apollinaire, Paul Valery, Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gottfried Benn and Rilke come to mind if we wish to suggest the order of magnitude where Attila József belongs to. However, these analogies don't say much about the peculiar characteristics of his poetry.

Attila József was representing modern poetry in an era which began in the second half of the nineteen twenties after the decline of the avant-garde. He belonged to those poets who were able to harmonize the most modern endeavors of the era, the notions of existentialist philosophy, the formula of the self designed by the psychoanalysis, the human consequences of the Einsteinian world perception and with regard to forms, the inheritance of the avant-garde with forms derived from tradition, the acceptance of the deepest layers of folklore, the poetry of Villon, the genres of antiquity and with the requirements of metrics.

During his short, tragically broken career his genius displayed itself in versatile poems written in many different ways always at a high aethetic level. In the beginning of his mature era from 1927 until his suicide in 1937 he had a short "Mallarme moment" when he became the devotee of poesie pure and attempted to create concentrated poems resembling to fine Japanese ink drawings. He considered the work of art a miniature replica of the universe and wrote poems he considered models of the universe.

He very soon abandoned this program, realizing its barriers and difficulties, but he kept the demand of absolute poetry throughout his entire career. The situation of Hungarian history promised a radical historical - social transformation to the writers of the era. Attila József wished to serve this historical action with his poetry. The promotion of action and consciousness brought hard core reality and dynamic rhetorics aimed at conviction back to his poetry, therefore his poems written in the beginning of the thirties most resemble the works of Mayakovsky and Brecht in their thematic and intonations, but from the viewpoint of poetics he can also be considered the descendant of Petőfi, Victor Hugo or the French - Belgian Emile Verhaeren and even can be related to Éluard who emerged from surrealism.

History didn't fulfill expectations. Attila József's career was taken over by involuntary passiveness, solitude, melancholy and intellectual contemplation Pathos disappeared, personality lost importance. Harrowing compositions of tragic recognition of the self, responsibility and coping with the difficulties of life were born one after another in his atelier. In his last years injuries he suffered and his guilty conscience took over the self having lost its balance and led to the unfolding of a self-analytical, confessional lyricism. Sin, loneliness, the problem of defenselessness, the struggle with the memory of the lost mother and father, the trouble with the trauma of his childhood received dominant parts in his late poetry with less lyrical parallels, bearing more resemblance to the prose of the era, to Franz Kafka or Albert Camus. And if we are looking for a more familiar Hungarian analog for the world to describe him, then his poetry is particularly comparable to the music of Béla Bartók.

He went through several psychic shocks, he was convinced his life had no prospect and in the peak of his poetical power he ended his life at the age of 33.

Text by György Tverdota