Volume and cycle compositions in Hungarian court poetry based on the works of László Listius, Péter Beniczky, Pál Esterházy, and István Koháry

Abstract

In my paper I examine volume and cycle compositions by four representatives of seventeenth-century Hungarian court poetry, László Listius, Péter Beniczky, Pál Esterházy and István Koháry. I provide an overview of the entire Hungarian oeuvre of Listius, Beniczky and Esterházy, while in the case of Koháry I offer selected examples showing how second-rank poets of the era consciously constructed their great compositions, which created coherence across the individual works. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that despite the similarities between the views and the social background of the four poets, they produced poetry of a vastly different nature.