Anwar opined that Amir, through Nyanyi Sunyi, brought a new style to the Indonesian language, with its "compactly violent, sharp, and yet short" sentences.[1] In a 1945 article he wrote (translation by Raffel), "Before Amir (Hamzah) one could call the old poetry a destructive force; but what a bright light he shone on the new language".[1]