balassi was a true renaissance figure, a child of his age, a noble writer who was reckless in romance and hot-tempered, but also a humanist with exceptionally refined taste. it was he who was responsible for the rebirth of hungarian literature, transforming latin into the hungarian language, making him the second world-class hungarian poet after janus pannonius. a worthwhile contemporary of ronsard, spenser and sidney, he was a loyal adherent to the neo-platonic philosophy of love and francesco petrarch's mode of poetic expression, which he refreshed with local flavor and new poetic solutions. having been influenced by german, italian, polish, turkish and perhaps also croatian, balassi absorbed neo-latin poetry at an early age, and eventually came to hold the same position in the history of hungarian literature as that of petrarch in italian literature. poems had already been written in hungarian before him, but balassi's technique of literary expression – fictive lyrical autobiographies in cycles of verse – was his true innovative gift to hungarian literature. according to traditional historic accounts, he assembled his poems together, written in "his own hand" shortly before or after he left hungary for poland in 1589. the unprinted volume circulated for years thereafter and comprised a collection of 100 poems that depicted balassi as a heavenly version of himself; hopelessly struggling with love, losing to cupid, burned on the pyre of passion, relinquishing julia, leaving his homeland, searching for his old love in a new one, embarking on a pilgrimage through hell, arguing with god in poetic guilt. it was this "virtual" balassi that took the place of the "real" unsuccessful one and sparked the imagination of subsequent generations. his students not only respected him as an emblematic figure of hungarian literature (and of the hungarian language in a broader sense), but also of culture, worthy of following as a european model for the renewal of civilized life.