Anna Balakian: The symbolist movement in the literature of the European languages - A comparative history of literatures in European languages 2. (Budapest, 1982)
Part IV. The Consolidation and Metamorphosis of the Symbolist Imprint
say was encyclopaedic in its completeness. This is obviously not a question of subjectmatter. Baudelaire himself repeatedly wrote that his poems receive their full significance only in the context of the whole volume. Ady’s work is not simply an arrangement of contrasting elements; he constructs a whole system around the key motifs of Death, Love, Life, God, Revolution, and Hungary. Some think his use of symbols is perfectly coherent, and reconstruct from his works a consciously developed and complete system, comparable to and commensurate with that of the Divine Comedy.29 A strange, often overloaded but always extremely intense poetry is thus born. Even single worlds of the universe he created over the years reinforce and explain each other; yet each and every one of his poems reflects the will to give expression to the totality of the world. The central personality thus looms inordinately large. As one of his contemporaries, László Vajthó well saw, the chief symbol of his system is he himself: Endre Ady. Every symbol — to refer to an insight of the linguist, Eugene Minkowski, (“The metaphor is provided by language itself. The symbol, basically, need not be introduced into language”)30 — bears in itself the act of creation. The most characteristic feature of Ady’s symbolism and system of symbols is that this act, the individual myth thus produced, takes on the classic task of lyrical poetry: the will, the necessity, or — in Ady’s case — the obligation to establish a communion. The social revolution whose possibility, necessity (and dangers) even politicians failed to face as bluntly as he did, became a vital question of transcendent dimensions in the lyrical myth of his poetry (“He wrote love poems to revolution”, said Georg Lukács in a later article)31 just as, say, the possibility or impossibility of poetical expression was a vital question for Mallarmé. Or, to look at it another way: after Arany’s (soon forgotten) attempts Hungarian lyrical poetry had to wait for Ady’s oeuvre to take a definite turn in the direction of what is today usually referred to as ontological poetry. Many of his contemporaries rightly saw Ady as the greatest Hungarian metaphysical poet that had ever lived. The system itself, whether we regard it as perfectly unified or as built up layer on layer (either topically or with passing of time), can obviously be made sense of only by following it symbol by symbol. Ady’s sense of his vocation to unify the community is unambiguously shown by the fact that he refers to and builds upon the imagery and consciousness of an existing (or non-existent) national mythology to an ever increasing 29 The standpoints and arguments on this are well-known. See: M. Babits, “Tanulmány Adyról” (A study on Ady), Nyugat, 1920; “Megjegyzések Földessy Ady-könyvére” (Remarks on Földessy’s Book on Ady), Nyugat, 1921; Földessy, Ady minden titkai (All of Ady’s secrets), Budapest, 1949; and László Bóka’s numerous articles, monographs, and university lectures; see also an entire wealth of material from Béla Balázs to János Barta. For another point of view, see Attila József “Ady-vízió” (A vision of Ady), Toll, 1929, also József Attila összes Művei Kritikai Kiadás III., Budapest 1958) and István Király (op. cit. vol. I, p. 8), who categorically deny the existence of such a symbol system. 30 Eugéne Minkowski, “Métaphore et Symbole” (Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme, 1964, 5.). 31 György Lukács, Ady, a magyar tragédia nagy énekese (Ady, the great minstrel of the Hungarian tragedy), (Budapest, 1954). 377