Invention of the Poet of the Nation-Building Era: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Yahya Kemal Monograph

Abstract

This study aims to discuss Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s monograph Yahya Kemal, published shortly after the poet Yahya Kemal’s death. It focuses on Tanpinar's attempt to examine Yahya Kemal’s personality, character, worldview, poetic aesthetics, and position him in the history of Turkish literature. In addition, this study discusses the cultural, political and literary implications of this attempt. Using the discussions on the concept of the monograph, it investigates Tanpinar's evaluation of Yahya Kemal's ideas by comparing them with modern trends in the history of Western European modern thought. It also considers his poetic production in relation to world literatures, in order to show the singularity and uniqueness of Yahya Kemal’s personality and literary productions in relation to other Turkish authors from both his own and the previous generation. It argues that in directly placing Yahya Kemal at the center of the Turkish nation-building process and modern Turkish poetry, Tanpinar underlines the poet’s skillfulness in the nationalization and domestication of Western European cultural and literary traditions, in which he interacts according to the needs of the modern Turkish nation. The article thus demonstrates that Tanpinar transforms his monograph into a narrative that invents Yahya Kemal as the poet of the nation-building process by reconnecting the current literature of the Turkish nation through his creative dialogue with classical Ottoman poetry.