‘Lizard on a Sunlit Stone’: Lőrinc Szabó and the Biopoetical Beginnings of Modern Poetry

Abstract

Since the 1990s, Lőrinc Szabó’s poetry has been radically re-evaluated in Hungarian literary criticism. In his works from the early 1930s, there are numerous lesser-known poems that merit a more thorough poetic inquiry to justify the recent recognition of the poet’s significance. What is most striking in these poems is the way Szabó’s lyric poetry revised the classical-modern constructions of the subject and the concomitant poetic modes of perception at the onset of late modernity around 1930–32. His volumes Különbéke (Separate Peace) and Harc az ünnepért (Struggle for the Feast) contain many poems that use encounters between the human and the natural to discredit the old premises (prominent in earlier poets such as Endre Ady and Mihály Babits) of classical-modern subjectivity, of the self-sufficient subject freely creating his or her own life. In Szabó’s poems from this period, the problems arising from Nietzsche’s physiological anthropology, Russell’s theory of perception, and the new conception of bios developed by Uexküll and his followers became more prominent, which lead to memorable poems such as A belső végtelenben (In the Inner Infinity), Szamártövis (Thistle), Egy egér halálára (On the Death of a Mouse), and the 1949 poem A földvári mólón (At the Pier of Földvár).