SOURCE: "Gyula Illyés, A Living Classic," in The New Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 88, Winter, 1982, pp. 9-22.

In the following essay, Domokos defines Illyés's "classicism"—the strength of his poetry due to its complete integration with the Europe in which it was created.

Gyula Illyés's first pieces were published in the beginning of the twenties in Hungarian and international classical avant-garde magazines. Since then, from over fifty published volumes and innumerable other writings as yet unpublished in book form, a many-sided artistic world emerges, whose every individual manifestation must always have been found astonishingly new, disturbingly original and exciting by his readers—to borrow the title of one of his late poems, each piece belongs to "the world of eternal works of art." The author himself is considered one of the truest, one of the most representative of Hungarian writers. His great fellow-poet and friend, L...