Contexts around Gyöngyösi at the Turn of the 18th and 19th Centuries

The Role of the Poet in the Writings of József Gvadányi, Ferenc Kazinczy, and Ferenc Kölcsey

Abstract

The reception history of István Gyöngyösi’s poetry is known to literary historians from numerous studies. The present paper discusses some of the well-known judgements made about Gyöngyösi at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, and analyses them in their primary context. It examines the different factors in the literary and cultural discourse that shaped the thinking about Gyöngyösi prior to the era of systematic literary history. The study aims to revise the narrative of the reception history by focusing on three authors, József Gvadányi, Ferenc Kazinczy and Ferenc Kölcsey. One of the main conclusions of the study is that their statements about the poet are not so much about Gyöngyösi as about the current dilemmas of their own time: in the case of Gvadányi about the conflict between Hungarian tradition and foreign trends, in Kazinczy’s works about questions of language and poetry in the strict sense, and in Kölcsey’s case about the causes and possibilities of the missing Hungarian national poetry.