His first poems were influenced by his experiences as a peasant child: village life, proximity to nature, Catholicism, folklore, Hungarian peasant culture with its roots in the pre-Christian era of the nation. Later he started translating poems from various languages, this influenced him too. In 1952 his political views changed and this caused a change in his poetry, his poems after that time were full of motifs of dark and cold, he felt that important values were endangered. The suppression of the revolution in 1956 shocked him, after that he did not publish poems until 1965.