Women’s Writing and Secrets in the Poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922–1991)

Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1922–1991) is one of the most famous Hungarian poets of the twentieth century and is also well known outside Hungary. She is the only woman writer whose poems are included in secondary school books in Hungary. She wrote poems in the second half of the 20th century that belong to an intellectual-philosophical tradition of European poetry. She classified her writings as “objective poetry”, linking her work to that of T. S. Eliot. Nemes Nagy was considered a “masculine” woman poet by her contemporaries. Yet she had been writing poems in a totally different fashion as well throughout her life; these poems were discovered after her death. The poems belonging to this other, hidden group, in contrast to her objective-intellectual-impersonal-masculine/genderless and canonized poems, are subjective, personal and feminine. This paper examines the early reception history of Nemes Nagy, searching for the factors that had possibly led her to the decision not to publish, but to hide the poems written in the feminine mode; and analyses some of her hidden feminine poems as well her last poems in which an acknowledgement of the above described two-sidedness happens in a most beautiful metaphorical way.