In Hungarian literature the Classicist tradition of the patriotic ode had its heyday in the early 1800s. Under the influence of Horace, the Roman republican ethos, stoic virtue, and Plutarch’s theory of great men, works by Benedek Virág, Dániel Berzsenyi, and Ferenc Vályi Nagy made the patriotic ode the pre-eminent cultural genre of the natio hungarica. The most emblematic specimen, Berzsenyi’s A magyarokhoz (“To the Magyars”, written between 1796-1810 as a variant on Horace’s Ad Populum Romanum), added an Ossianic twist by foregrounding the role of the poet as a prophetic bard who represents and speaks for his whole community while evoking the receding figures of erstwhile national greatness. A later, more Romantic, variant, Károly Kisfaludy’s immensely popular 1825 Mohács surveys in Ossianic mode the battlefield where the Medieval Kingdom of Hungary was vanquished bythe Ottomans (1526). Kisfaludy’s poem does finish in a more optimistic note, however, with a call to turn the past into a mere learning experience. Another Classicist tradition, that of the Plutarchan ode, also lingered, and reached new heights in János Arany’s poem on the death of Széchenyi (1860).

Patriotic sentiment suffused Hungarian Romantic verse. From a widespread and intense poetic production of the 1820-40s, three major poems stand out, which have dominated the cult of nationality up to the present. These are Hymnus (“Hymn”) by Ferenc Kölcsey (1823), Szózat (“Appeal”) by Mihály Vörösmarty (1836), and Nemzeti dal (“National Song”) by Sandor Petőfi (1848). They obtained an enormous presence in education and cultural memory, and were constantly performed at commemorations, to the point where practically every grown Hungarian is supposed to know them by heart. Traditionally, Hymnus is sung at the beginning, Szózat at the end of public ceremonies; Nemzeti dal is recited the annual celebrations of 15 March. In one way or the other, all three present ethical imperatives stemming from nationhood.

Written in 1823 (finished on January 22 – celebrated as the Day of Hungarian Culture since 1989), Hymnus was first published in Károly Kisfaludy’s almanac Aurora in 1829. It takes the form of an intercessory prayer soliciting God for grace, protection, and prosperity for the community; it follows the diction of 16-17th century Protestant preachers and borrows the metrical and rhyme structure of a 1606 Hungarian translation of the Psalms). Based on the supposed analogy of Biblical Jewish and Hungarian history (prevalent in early Hungarian Protestant thought), it explains the misfortunes of Magyars as a divine retribution for their sins. Profoundly imbued with Protestant notions of sin, retribution and grace, Hymnus was not long banned from performance in Catholic churches. The dilemma of reconciling religious dogma and national commitment in the “nation’s prayer” still sparked a heated debate as late as 1903. The poem also is deeply historicist, surveying Hungarian history from the Conquest through Medieval glory to its decline, and deriving a sense of genealogical identity with the primeval Magyar conquerors under Arpad. In Kölcsey’s case this descent was not merely a collective metonymy: according to the family tradition the poet descended directly from one of the original tribes. In the poem’s theological context, the nation resembles more a Biblical Chosen People than a modern societal community.

In a more secular fashion, Vörösmarty’s Appeal speaks directly to the community and foregrounds the moral imperative of tenaciousness in national commitment: “Oh, Magyar, keep immovably/ your native country's trust,/ for it has borne you, and at death/ will consecrate your dust!”.  After the obligatory historical survey (once again evoking the Conquerors and the Ottoman Wars), Appeal culminates in a grandiose dystopian vision of an imaginary funeral where “a nation sinks” in the face of mourning mankind. Vörösmarty’s refiguration of the “death of the nation” topos (prevalent in Hungarian political thought since the late 18th century) resonates with the political rhetoric of the liberal nobility and its classicist cult of “Liberty”, but also recycles the 17-18th century extra Hungariam non est vita topos.

Among the three, it was the National Song that performed the most direct political work. Rather than divine grace or moral stance, it foregrounds political activism. The poem, which Petőfi wrote on 13 March 1848 while preparing for a rally, was publicly recited by the poet four times in the streets of Pest during the revolutionary day of 15 March. It became the revolution’s iconic poem thanks to its mobilizing pathos, which bursts out in the opening line (“Rise Magyar! is the country’s call!”) and culminates in the refrain (“For by the Magyar’s God above/ We truly swear,/ We truly swear the tyrant's yoke/ No more to bear!”). The first text printed in disregard of censorship rules, it was quickly mass-distributed on leaflets; during the following days it was republished by practically every newspaper in the country. Along with numerous counter-poems, cartoons and other graphic representations (lines from the poem showed up in a picture-puzzle next month), its immediate translations included four German version (three of which appeared the next day). Non-Magyar nationalities also produced their own versions: Jan Botto’s Hore Slovak was written in March, Andrei Mureşanu’s Desteapta-te Romane during the summer.

Petőfi’s poem reemploys the household images of Reform Age patriotic poetry and the natio hungarica type of nationhood (heroic virtues, past glory and fame, and even Dugonics’s mythological “God of the Magyars”) only to profoundly re-contextualize them and propose a radically different concept of nationhood. The trope “our ancient sword” (as opposed to shackles/chains) seems to allude to the traditional attribute of the nobility (and thus the natio hungarica) but the way the poem refers to the implied audience as “slaves” who have to regain their lost freedom is highly inconsistent with that concept of feudal nationhood. Petőfi seems to refer to i new historical vision (formulated in the historiography of the 1840s) of Hungarian Prehistory, which saw the “people” (i.e. peasantry), once free and equal to the nobles, as enslaved by the (alien or alienated) gentry. Petőfi sees the nation in terms of this myth: as an ancient community of equals to be resurrected in the present. Less concerned with a sense of decline than the earlier poems, and more inclusive in its sense of Hungarian nationhood, National Song was able to exert enormous and immediate political effect. In cultural memory, the poem retrospectively overshadowed the denominational and social limitations in Hymnus and Appeal by assimilating their concepts of (national) community to its own.

All three of these poems competed in the mid-19th century quest for a Hungarian national anthem, or, in the vocabulary of the age, people’s hymn or folk hymn (néphimnusz), to replace the Austrian imperial Gott erhalte. (By picking the title “national song”, Petőfi seems to have consciously aspired to this honor; no wonder that one of its immediate German translations bore the title Nationalhymne der Magyaren.) Eventually the winner was Hymnus even if it had failed to arouse much public attention prior to the mid-1840s – apart from a friend of Kölcsey’s reciting it in 1832 at a public reading in the Pest Casino, a cultural club founded by István Széchenyi. Marking the growing eagerness to find a representative patriotic poem that was also singable, public competitions for orchestration were called for Appeal in 1843 (won by Béni Egressy) and for Hymnus in 1844 (won by Ferenc Erkel). Curiously, while National Song was put to music in a dozen versions in 1848, none of them stuck.

Ceremonial performances of Hymnus started as early as 1844, first at the launching of the Széchenyi steam ship in Buda. The first event where Hymnus and Appeal were being performed together took place in 1847 at the National Theatre in Pest, celebrating the inauguration of Archduke Stephan of Austria as Palatine (viceroy/regent) of Hungary. The first time that all three were being performed (musically or verbally) at the same event came on the night of 15 March 1848, at the National Theatre’s free programme saluting the revolution.

From the 1850s Hymnus quickly found its place in anthologies and school textbooks, and was routinely performed at significant occasions, including the performance of Erkel’s historical opera Erzsébet saluting the visit of Franz Joseph and Sissi in 1857 and the Kazinczy Celebrations in Széphalom in 1859. It was performed when Franz Joseph was entering the throne-room in Buda Castle in 1865 when re-opening the Hungarian parliament reopened as well as at Kossuth’s funeral in 1894. During the dualist era, however, Gott erhalte remained the official anthem for the whole of Austria–Hungary. Having been the unofficial anthem for more than a century, Hymnus was recognized as such as late as 1989 when its status as Hungary’s national anthem was incorporated into the Constitution.