Sandor Petofi: Peasant Women and Th-Century Poetry

sandor petofi: He had been enamoured for years of the 19th-century poetry of Janos Arany and Sandor Petofi, who evoked the plain quiet, boundless, bare beauty and who wrote eloquently of lonely shepherds, withered peasant women and wild horses, according to Hamilton Spectator. Through Hapsburg and Ottoman rule, this vast, empty plain, called the Puszta, was for Hungarians their own Big Sky Country, and it remained an untameable, immutable terrain symbolic of liberty, even when the nation farms were collectivized under the Soviets. It was an escape, a yearning for beauty amid economic malaise and depressing city life. In 1973, most of the great plain was designated Hungary first national park, and in 1999 it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was September, and the refugee crisis at Hungary southern border with Serbia was an exodus of biblical proportions. My uncle, who taught high school English in Budapest, recalled recently how when he walked across the fields during that visit, "you could see and feel each of the words of these great poets, one by one — words that as a schoolboy, I had to learn and know now by heart." When he told me this, I was preparing to visit Hungary, specifically Hortobagy National Park in the Puszta. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.