"Finally Now I Have My Home" - On the Centenary of Attila József ’s Birth
"Finally Now I Have My Home" - On the Centenary of Attila József ’s Birth

Summary/Abstract: A unique fate awaited Attila József, the greatest figure of twentieth-century Hungarian lyric verse. His oeuvre documented both the dominant ideas of his age and the universal experience of the human psyche with unparalleled intimacy— through his own fate. József’s impact on poetry is comparable to that of Bartók on music. And yet his contemporaries realised with dismay just what an epoch-making poet he was only when his death certificate was issued, at the age of thirty-two, after he had laid himself on the tracks under a freight train about to depart a small village and was killed on the spot. Thus the symbolic date of his birth as a major poet and the all too tangible date of his death are one and the same. He published his first volume of poetry at the age of seventeen in Makó, the small town 200 kilometres south of Budapest where he attended secondary school. In the fifteen years that followed, seven more volumes of his were to appear, with an increasing number of mature masterpieces in them. And yet, neither the critics nor József’s fellow writers recognised his stature as a poet. With the exception of a few good friends and Dezső Kosztolányi, practically everyone received his lyric experiments in which he strove to expand the bounds “to the limits of reason and beyond” with incomprehension or indifference.[...]

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