Quote by Endre Ady: “I am the Son of Gog and Magog, I beat at barriers in vain.”

This is a cry from someone who knows they are an outsider — descended from something ancient and threatening — trying to break through a wall that will not open. The futility is the point: some people are cast as permanently on the wrong side of civilization's gates, beating against what will never let them in.

Ady published this poem in his landmark 1906 collection New Verses, which scandalized the Hungarian literary establishment with its radical imagery and rejection of national romanticism. Hungary was part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, and tensions over national identity, class, and modernization were running high. Ady identified with the marginalized and the rebellious.

Hungarian poet and journalist who became the defining literary voice of the Hungarian modernist movement in the early twentieth century. His collection New Verses broke decisively with nineteenth-century Hungarian poetic tradition and introduced symbolist and expressionist modes. He was a fierce critic of the conservative Hungarian establishment and a champion of social reform.