Turgut Uyar'ın Divan'ında bir araç olarak biçim = Form as an instrument in Turgut Uyar's Divan

Abstract

In 1970 Turgut Uyar, one of the leading members of the poetry movement known as the “second new”, published a collection of poems entitled Divan. This collection differs from his other works in that it contains poems in couplets employing the Ottoman gazel, kaside, and rubai forms. Following the publication of Divan, Uyar found himself at the very center of the controversy on “benefiting from the tradition” and he received mixed reviews, from great praises to serious downright criticism. He responded to the praises and criticisms by stressing the claim that he was not a traditionalist poet but that he only employed traditional forms merely as instruments to achieve specific ends. The aim of this thesis is to identify Uyar’s stance with regard to Ottoman divan poetry, in order to determine his conception of the tradition and to study his “instrumentalization of form” by analyzing Divan under the guidance of his own statements. This thesis argues in four chapters that in Turgut Uyar’s Divan there is an overarching theme of popular revolution. In the first chapter, preparation for the revolution, the problematic of “alienation” and the relation between the form and concept of “continuity” are analyzed. The second chapter, which examines the “stream” metaphor in the book, deals with Uyar’s stance with regard to Ottoman divan poetry in the context of form-content incongruity, and discusses the issue of “form as medium of ideology”. The third chapter questions the relationship between history and form along with the concepts of “typification,” “homology” and “correspondence”. The last chapter, examines the disjunction between the center and the periphery on social as well as literary planes, and dwells on the concept of “nomadic war machine,” as well as on the subjects of resistance to public culture, mysticism, heterodoxy, and activism. In his Divan, Turgut Uyar sought to bring forth the culture of the populace, and in resorting to revolutionary content while covering the theme of the struggle of the oppressed classes, he employed “obsolete” and “superceded” poetic forms to attack Ottoman “court literature” and strove to rewrite that literature in a way that would reflect the values of the masses.