Talk:List of Slovak poets

message: Constantine was not a Slovak!!!!!! Slovak people do not exist in the 9th century!!! Constantine was a Greek!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
Sándor Petőfi, as the comment replacing his dates next to his name here identifies him, was indeed a Hungarian poet and, according to many, a great one, too. Whether he was a Magyarized Slovak, as the commentator would have us believe, depends on what is to be meant by the curious term "Magyarize". If it means, as Webster's definition of the term suggests, that he was "put under the domination or influence of Magyars” (“Magyar” meaning, in accordance with Webster's relevant entry, Hungarian), then the description of Petőfi as a great Hungarian poet and a Magyarized Slovak is either contradictory or redundant, depending on the component of Webster’s meaning attributed to the term “Magyarize”.  If Petőfi allowed himself, knowingly or unknowingly, to be “dominated” by Hungarians (or by Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks or Laplanders) while writing poem after poem to sing the praises of liberty, personal as well as national, then he was either a foolish or a hypocritical poet, but certainly not a great one. If, however, his Magyarization involved being influenced by Hungarians, then the comment does no more than state the obvious: as a devoted disciple of Hungary’s foremost Romantic poet Mihály Vörösmarty, the best friend of that country’s leading pre-Modern poet János Arany and, most importantly, an admirer of his country Hungary’s native idiom and folk poetry (one only has think of János vitéz, or John the Valiant, his long narrative poem based on Hungarian fairy-tale motifs), he can hardly have been anything but “influenced” by the Hungarians. (That this influence was fully mutual is best shown by the fact that simple folk in Petőfi’s country believe, to this day, his musicalized verses to have been written by nobody in particular, i.e. to be Hungarian folk-songs.) 
That Petőfi was originally a Slovak is, again, a matter of semantics. Petőfi’s partial Slovak descent can hardly be questioned. In biological terms—if biology is indeed ethnic destiny—as the son of Maria Hruzova, a Slovak woman, Petőfi was a half-Slovak. As for his “mother tongue”, Petőfi’s first language can hardly have been other than Hungarian. True, is father, one Stipe Petrovic, spoke Serbian and his mother Slovak as their native tongues. But then, as it will happen with a family of multiple ethnic backgrounds living in a “third” country, the language used within the family was also a “third” language, the language spoken by the outside world and the only language the spouses shared. For the Petőfis, or Petrovices, this language was Hungarian, a language whose native idiom little Sándor grew up with. All this does not decide, once and for all, the question whether Petőfi was a Slovak, a Hungarian or a Serb. I would personally like every Slovak and Serbian brother or sister of mine to embrace Petrovic-Petőfi as his or her own as I would like to continue believing him to belong to my own, Hungarian, nation. To call him a Slovak poet, Magyarized or otherwise, is another matter. One who wrote all his poetry, from the first syllable to the last, in his native Hungarian is certainly not Slovak (or Serbian) as a poet, whatever his genetic makeup may have been. 
In sum, we should either continue to refer to Petőfi, in Wikipedia and elsewhere, as a great Hungarian poet period, or undertake to change all the encyclopaedia entries of a similar nature to read something like this: Joseph Conrad, the great Anglicized Polish writer; T. S. Eliot, the great Anglicized American poet; Eugene Ionesco the great Gallicized (or Frenchified)  Romanian dramatist; Queen Victoria the great Britishized German monarch, etc. It is, of course, another matter that—unlike Victoria, who was queen for the British only—the outsdanding poets and writers of a mixed ethnic background wrote for everybody, regardless of their readers’ cultural identities or national prejudices. Petőfi certainly did so and on account of his supranational appeal he was a Slovak, as well as a Hungarian, a Serbian, a German or an Eskimo. Yes, Sándor Petőfi, or as we like to call him in his native Hungary Petőfi Sándor, was a poet and a great one.
(1) According to Slovak sources, they communicated in Slovak at home (the point is that Serbian and Slovak as Slavic languages are quite well mutually understandable, especially after some exercise), (2) What's the problem in calling someone both Hungarian and Slovak and whatever? Why this needless quasi-philosophy? Juro 22:52, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)