Attila József is Hungary's greatest modern poet. His extraordinary
poetry is exhilarating in its power, transcending the scars of a
difficult life. Born into poverty in 1905, deserted by his father and
put out to fostering, József had a brutalised childhood, and tried to
poison himself at the age of nine. Mostly self-educated, he was
prosecuted at 18 for blasphemy in a poem, and expelled from university a
year later for With a Pure Heart, a now celebrated poem which spoke for
a whole generation. He is a genuine revolutionary poet, neither
simple-minded nor difficult, though his thought and imagery are complex.
A deeply divided man, his poetry has a robust physicality as well as a
jaunty and heroic intelligence - Marxist in its dedication but fuelled
in its audacity by both Freud and Surrealism. Diagnosed as
schizophrenic, he underwent psychoanalysis, and yet continued to write
magnificent poetry which - although darker - drew upon highly exacting
and intricate structures and metres, and upon an eclectic but balanced
framework of ideas. By 1937 he was almost destitute, financially and
emotionally, and in deteriorating mental health. But he was still
writing some of his most compelling work, compulsive guilt-ridden poetry
whose glittering lyricism is at once personal and mythic, even while
receiving shock treatments and heavy medication in a sanatorium.
Finally, at the age of 32, he clambered onto a railway track, and a
train broke his neck and cut off his right arm.
