Behçet Necatigil ve şiirin ev hali

Abstract

Behçet Necatigil (1916-1979), one of few poets of Turkish poetry who could not directly be connected to a literary school or generation, is called as the “poet of homes” by some critics. This conception is partly related to his usage of “home” as the main metaphor, starting from his books entitled Çevre (1951) and Evler (1953). Home, being the fundamental space in Necatigil’s poetry, appears both in positive and negative connotations, as a nexus of felicity and boredom. Most critics explain this dual character of home within the tension between interior and exterior, or between insideness and outsideness of home. This thesis takes the same problematic of insideness and outsideness yet follows a different path, and attempts at resolving by the help of relations of difference such as intermingling, replacement, transition and permeability. Therefore, within the thesis, the altered meanings of home is mainly conceptualized in two contrasting spaces, i.e. “inner-home” and “outerhome”, through which it was argued how “doors” and “windows”, or the metaphors of “light” and “night” alter in poems, and how this alteration affects the conception of home. In addition, the enveloping spaces of home as the street and the city have also been taken into consideration for looking for how they influence the alterations in “inner” as well as “outer” homes. It is argued in the thesis that the inner-home has a positive connotation for it refers to a protected and warm conception of family, the traditional past and poet’s solitude. On the other hand, the outer-home refers to the economic difficulties of everyday life and a negative conception of family as a hindrance against poet’s free thinking. Thus, in Necatigil’s poetry, the individual appears to be divided between inner and outer home as well as in the in-world and the out-world. This may also define the very problem of individual in the modern life, divided between the public and the private spheres. Thesis offers to read Necatigil’s poetry as the metaphor of a poet who builds his “ideal home” with his poem to overcome the feeling of unhomeliness in modern times