He is the author of the Nemzeti dal (National Song), which is said to have inspired the revolution in the Kingdom of Hungary that grew into a war for independence from the Austrian Empire.

The population of Kiskőrös was predominantly of Slovak origin as a consequence of the Habsburgs' reconstruction policy designed to settle, where possible, non-Hungarians in areas devastated during the Turkish wars.

His father, István (Stephanus) Petrovics, was a village butcher, innkeeper and a second-generation Serb[5][6][7] or Slovak[1][8][9] immigrant to the Great Hungarian Plain.

His father tried to give his son the best possible education and sent him to a lyceum, but when Sándor was 15, the family went through a period of financial hardship due to the Danube floods of 1838 and the bankruptcy of a relative.

They married the next year, despite the opposition of her father, and spent their honeymoon at the castle of Count Sándor Teleki [hu]), the only aristocrat among Petőfi's friends.

He and Júlia moved to Pest, where he joined a group of like-minded students and intellectuals who regularly met at Café Pilvax [hu].

He was co-author and author, respectively, of the two most important written documents: the "12 Points", a list of demands to the Habsburg Governor-General, and the Nemzeti Dal, his revolutionary poem.

On the morning of the 15th, Petőfi and the revolutionaries began to march around the city of Pest, reading his poem and the "12 Points" to the growing crowd, which attracted thousands.

Crowds forced the mayor to sign the "12 Points" and later held a mass demonstration in front of the newly built National Museum, then crossed to Buda on the other bank of the Danube.

As one of the points was freedom for political prisoners, the crowd moved to greet the newly freed revolutionary poet Mihály Táncsics.

Those in the noblemen's Assembly in Pozsony (today Bratislava) had been pushing for slower reforms at the same time, which they delivered to the Emperor on the 13th, but events had overtaken them briefly.

Petőfi was last seen alive in the Battle of Segesvár on 31 July 1849, he was supposedly stabbed in the back by a jousting Russian soldier, although his body was never found.

In his autobiographical roman à clef Political Fashions (Politikai divatok, 1862), Mór Jókai imagined his late friend's "resurrection".

In the novel Petőfi (the character named Pusztafi) returns ten years later as a shabby, déclassé figure who has lost his faith in everything, including poetry.

Although for many years his death at Segesvár had been assumed, in the late 1980s Soviet investigators found archives that revealed that after the battle about 1,800 Hungarian prisoners of war were marched to Siberia.

Petőfi started his career as a poet with "popular situation songs", a genre to which his first published poem, "A borozó" (The Wine Drinker; 1842), belongs.

This kind of pseudo-folk song was not unusual in Hungarian poetry of the 1840s, but Petőfi soon developed an original and fresh voice which made him stand out.

Recent interpretations however call attention to the fact that in some sense all lyrical poetry can be understood as role-playing, which makes the category of "role-poems" (coined especially for Petőfi) superfluous.

While using a variety of voices, Petőfi created a well-formed persona for himself: a jaunty, stubborn loner who loves wine, hates all kinds of limits and boundaries and is passionate in all he feels.

Petőfi has a larger than life terra cotta statue near the Pest end of Erzsébet Bridge, sculpted by Miklós Izsó and Adolf Huszár [hu].

Postage stamps issued by Hungary: Since 29 June 2021, Petőfi has appeared as a recurring historical character living in modern-day England in The Family Histories Podcast series.