Gyula Szentessy

Gyula Szentessy (1870, Nagyvárad – 1905, Budapest) was a Hungarian poet.

Szentessy studied in Nagyvárad, Kolozsvár, and Buda, then he attended the Budapest University of Law. He worked as a post officer in the country, and later in Budapest. He was related to Bela Borsody Bevilaqua, PhD. His poems on factories and working women make him a predecessor of socialist poetry. His works included: "The Admirer and Other Poems" (Budapest, 1896); "Ninon’s Songs" (Budapest, 1898); "Selected Poems" (Budapest, 1900); "Reseda" (newer poems, Budapest, 1902); "The Collected Poems of Gyula Szentessy" (with biography by Pál Koroda, Budapest, 1906).

Literary historians consider Gyula Szentessy to be a poet describing social classes of the circles of proletarian and poor petty bourgeois women. Although the theme of a lot of his poems can be related to urban scenes, the linguistic and poetic aspect of his ways of presentation does not seem so stratificated. In his poem 'The Admirer', he takes the reader to places of the big city: Night-time. Silence in the country Machines clatter in the town The factory is lit while the sky is dark. Two hundred slaves working deaf Dreaming of home and family.

A typical feature of his poetry is making contrasts between scenes like country and town, or effects like darkness and light, silence and noise, which often carries metaphorical or allegorical meaning.