BAD POETS SOCIETY The science of the epigonism and dilettantism in the Hungarian literary critical thinking in the 19th century

Abstract

For reasons of space, only the first third of a bigger history of literary criticism dissertation appears here, which walks around, from the middle 18th towards the beginning of the 20th centuries the questions in which era what was considered bad poetry in the European and Hungarian literatures. While, starting from Horatius through Winckelmann and Wieland, to the end of the 18th century the big masters and poetical rules were merely underrated as emulating the formalities, so called “apes”, from the beginning of the 19th century, in the spirit of the originality prog- ram elaborated by Edward Young, practically all kind of text linkage turned out to be imitation, and consequently so, bad poetry. In the 1830s, at the same time with the vulgarization of the concept of authenticity, spread the attribute epigone, employed for the imitating poets. At the end of the 1850s, János Arany outlined in his study entitled Zrínyi and Tasso, which can be defined as ars poetica as well, the theory of text contacts in the modern sense, on the basis of which the question of originality and imitation proved to be irrelevant. At this time revived the question that Goethe and Schiller drew up in a sketch at the end of the 18th century: in so far as there are imitating, but good and original, but bad poets, then which are the poetical criteria of bad poetry. From the texts of the secondary poets János Arany and János Erdélyi created the catalogue of the toolbar, mistakes of bad poetry, practically in a unique way in the Hungarian literature. The dilettante concept introduced by Goethe and Schiller from the 1860s until the turn of the century spread gradually, in several phases, and started to represent the professional, but not the top-rank artist.