Babits’s last years were overshadowed by cancer of the larynx, which caused him great physical suffering; and the rise of a totalitarian regime in Germany – with its implications for Hungary – filled him with despair. Yet his illness was a source of strength; his last poetic work, The Book of Jonah (1939), with its postscript ‘The Prayer of Jonah’, is a summary and poetic stock-taking of values, destiny, and the ultimate validity of the poet’s message. While Jonah is the symbol of man’s helplessness, unable to discover the intentions of the Eternal One, he is also a self-portrait: Babits’s bitter repentance for his withdrawal into the miniature world of the self. Babits now realized that no poet can refrain from assuming responsibility, ‘because he who is silent is an accomplice of the guilty ones, / brother is called to account for the deeds of his brothers’.

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