This article reviews Deniz Aktan Küçük's The Human Voice Resonating in Divine Silence: Tevfik Fikret and Modern Ottoman Poetry (2023), a work that re-examines Tevfik Fikret's poetry beyond the formulaic explanations of modern Turkish literature and the teleological narratives of Ottoman modernization. The book's central inquiry is how different subjectivities—expressed through the lyrical voice or poetic persona—experience modernity as "history". Aktan Küçük’s approach deliberately moves beyond reducing the subject to Tevik Fikret’s biography or psychology. Instead, it adopts a close-reading method that inductively opens the poems to the historicity of subjectivity. The study maintains a productive tension: it simultaneously disengages the subject from determinist frameworks while universalizing it through philosophical debates on subjectivity and anchoring it within a "modern Ottoman" paradigm. In doing so, the book reframes Fikret's poetry as a site where crisis, transformation, and secular consciousness converge, offering insights into a world-historical moment that paved the way for the Turkish Republic.
