Poetic Urbanism in Turkish Modernist Poetry

Abstract

The 1950s marked a modernist turn in Turkish literature with the production of a number of works both in prose and poetry that displayed a search for new themes and forms of expression in literature. This modernist turn first began to take shape in the 1940s and consolidated itself in the 1950s with the publication of literary works that sought artistic experimentation. These works are characterized by individualism, alienation, formalism, irony, and a direct break with mimetic representation. In addition to fiction, Turkish poetry experienced a similar modernist paradigm shift that continues to shape today’s poetic production. In addition to the aforementioned type of fictional texts, a number of poetry collections with modernist characteristics were published one after another in the second half of the 1950s: Turgut Uyar’s Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı (The Most Beautiful Arabia in the World, 1959); Edip Cansever’s Yerçekimli Karanfil (The Gravitational Carnation, 1957), Umutsuzlar Parkı (The Park of the Despairing, 1958), and Petrol (1959); Cemal Süreya’s Üvercinka (1958); Ece Ayhan’s Kınar Hanımın Denizleri (Kınar Hanım’s Oceans, 1959); Sezai Karakoç’s Körfez (The Bay, 1959); Ülkü Tamer’s Soğuk Otların Altında (Under the Cold Weeds, 1959); and İlhan Berk’s Galile Denizi (The Sea of Galilee, 1958). It is precisely for this reason that literary critic Orhan Koçak has characterized this period as one of an “explosion” in the production of modernist poetry. 1 Interestingly enough, this was not the result of a predetermined poetic movement. None of the poets was cognizant of each other’s experimental poems being written published in different magazines at the same time as they were writing the early poems which would be later collected in their first books. This modernist turn in Turkish literature was a result of a social, political, economic, and cultural transformation in Turkey during the 1950s.