5. The Minor Poets
5. The Minor Poets
Of the minor poets associated with the Nyugat, Milán Füst (1888–1967), deserves a special mention for his early experiments with vers libre. His somewhat eccentric personality gave rise to many literary anecdotes, and he was the target of numerous conservative attempts to abuse the Nyugat for its ‘modernity’. Füst’s lyre is a single-stringed instrument; his poems give the over-all impression of a chanting, wailing man, obsessed by a constant fear of persecution, embittered and always on the verge of total despair, but who survives with pathetic heroism in an apparently insane world. The effect is remarkable; inner rhythms are powerfully brought to the surface by the shrieking tone of the poems (e.g. ‘Old Age’, 1940). Laments, dirges, or the psalms of an esoteric religion come to mind as possible parallels or inspiration to Füst’s poetry, particularly to the poems of his old age. His imagery is often surrealistic, full of riddles and recondite allusions. He also wrote fiction; The Story of My Wife (1942) is an outstanding piece of narrative about the all-consuming passion of jealousy, remarkable for a carefully-observed psychological study of its hero, Captain Störr, a Dutchman, who tells the story of his marriage.
The long career of Oszkár Gellért (1882–1967) was not without sharp turns. For a time an editor of Nyugat, Gellért’s poetry went unnoticed by the critics until the 1920s. Readers regarded him as one of ‘those moderns’ whose directness and frankness might cause embarrassment. Indeed, Gellért, whose early poetry revolved mostly around sexual fantasies, incest and sadism not excepted, is always straightforward, and is not afraid of unadorned language or startling revelations (On the Knees of Ophelia, 1911). His style is devoid of embellishments; he cared very little about being considered pedestrian. His poems are frequently speculative and appear to be lacking genuine inspiration, yet he seemed to possess qualities that influenced younger poets.
Gellért stopped writing poetry in the mid-1930s, and his second period of productivity started in old age. These later poems are, however, entirely different from his earlier efforts: they consist chiefly of occasional verses commenting on political topics with a zealotry that left him with few admirers, with the exception of the ‘Establishment’, which was grateful—at least for the time being—even for his lame efforts at socialist-realism.
The poetry of Ernő Szép (1884–1953) is characterized by his untiring, child-like admiration for life. The cult of childhood, the viewing of life with the innocent and unsophisticated eyes of the child, was very fashionable at the beginning of this century, following the revelations of modem psychology about the child living on in the inner self of every adult. Young Kosztolányi was influenced by the fasion for a time, and Szép cultivated the image of the helpless, pop-eyed child all his life. In addition, his poems are pervaded by a constant sadness, either because his childhood memories are about minor deprivations, or because he feels that life is passing and this is sad, and eventually we all must die. These platitudes served as a background to the neo-primitive songs of an enervated, decadent poet whose playfulness also managed occasionally to manifest itself in the mask of the weeping child.
Szép’s world is inhabited by ‘animate’ objects, clouds, stars, flowers, falling leaves, or little dogs. While his naďvety is not entirely free from mannerism, his cult of smiles, sadness, sighs, or affected tears, along with his warm-heartedness and a genuine compassion for suffering, are what preserve the appeal of his verse. His favourite genre is the song (Book of Songs, 1912); his language is a peculiar mixture of children’s speech, dialect words, slang, and the refined idiom of the literary usage. His prose is also permeated by an intensely subjective approach, particularly his novels which were inspired by autobiographical reminiscences. Wistaria (1919) is the somewhat sentimental story of his youthful loves and disappointments as a journalist in Pest, the film version of which, directed by Steve Sekely in 1934, was the most spectacular hit of the contemporary Hungarian cinema.
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