A Concise History of Turkish Republican Poetry: The Return of the Repressed

Abstract

Turkish Republican Poetry borrowed two dominant trends from modern Ottoman poetry in the early 1920s: La Poésie pure and Syllabic Poetry. Although the defenders of “La Poésie pure,” of which Ahmet Haşim and Yahya Kemal were the most prominent representatives, and the poets who would be called the “Five Syllabists” were the dominant tendencies in poetry in the early Republic era, they would later lose their influence and Republican Poetry would move forward by adopting Nâzım Hikmet's “free verse” from 1929. Although Nâzım Hikmet's “free verse” was suppressed for political reasons at the time it was written, the Strange Trio (Garip) continued the “free verse” from 1937, emphasizing the world and language of the “little man”. After Strange Trio, the Second Renewal Movement (İkinci Yeni), which emerged in 1953-1954, met with resistance because it was based on an autonomous poetic language. In the 1960s, as a result of political developments in Turkey, while Nâzım Hikmet's banned poetry was republished and a socialist understanding became dominant in poetry, the Second Renewal was pushed to the periphery. In the 1980s, while socialist trend lost its central position, the books of Second Renewal started to circulate again and became canonical. Since the 1990s, there have been some struggles to overcome the “canonical” Second Renewal, and especially the “experimental poetry” has come to the fore. When we look at the century-long history of Turkish Republican Poetry, we see that Nâzım Hikmet and the Second Renewal Movement were suppressed at the time of their emergence, but in the following years they were re-circulated and created a wide sphere of influence. Nâzım Hikmet and the Second Renewal, in other words the return of the two “suppressed” poems, determined the history of Turkish Republican Poetry.