Pudjangga Baru in Retrospect

Abstract

Just as Tatengkeng’s poetry never went beyond the historically interesting, so the literature produced by the pudjangga baru, with the sole exception of Amir Hamzah’s work, did not as a rule survive the revolution of 1945. Even the judgement imposed on them by later generations tends to underline the similarity between the Tachtigers and Pudjangga Baru. Just as the Dutch generation of 1880 lost some of its significance in literary terms when it was reappraised by later critics who related it to the preceding generations, so Pudjcmgga Baru lost some of its stature in its reappraisal by post-war Indonesian critics. There were few writers of the Dutch generation of 1880 who, after a short but fierce burst of early activity, produced anything worthwhile in their later lives, and they were soon surpassed by greater writers. In the same way most of the writers of Pudjangga Baru have been inactive or at all events outdone by their successors who considered themselves the real innovators, the authentic revolutionaries responsible for Indonesian independence and for their Bahasa Indonesia. These successors were the Angkatan 1945,⁷⁴ the generation of 1945.