The other day, while waiting for CV to arrive, I looked up in the sky and saw this dramatic image.
Daily Archives: January 26, 2005
János Pilinszky
As I shared my interest in Czeslaw Milosz known among my friends, one of my housemates told me about the great Hungarian poet János Pilinszky. I'll list some references that I will come back to when I'm ready to learn more about Pilinszky:
- As a writer of metaphysical poetry, essay and drama, Pilinszky has deeply influenced postwar Hungarian poetry. His early experiences in the second World War prison camps where he spent several months had only strengthened his personal alienation and existential anguish, and resulted in uniquely intense poems.
- In their attempt to confront the horror and name the unnameable, poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rózewicz, and János Pilinszky committed themselves to a dry, laconic anti-poetry. They displayed a powerful ambivalence toward the very work they were creating, mistrusting it for outlasting the Catastrophe and, in the words of Rózewicz, "for having survived when those who created the poetry were dead."
- HUNGARIANS CONSIDER János Pilinszky to be one of their best living poets. Sándor Weöres, a towering poet, and nobody’s lipserver, calls him ‘our greatest’.
Notelets for 2005.01.25
I now know who LeRoy Neiman is.
More on Milosz: Books | In gratitude for all the gifts by Seamus Heaney.
