Modernist change in the poetry of Metin Eloğlu

Abstract

Metin Eloğlu whose poems were published between the years of 1943-1984 is a poet who could remain unique in the modernization of Turkish poetry, in a poetry environment where the movements of Garip and İkinci Yeni generated important breakthroughs. Eloğlu kept an understanding of “art for society” in his first three poetry books and created a unique poetry language that utilized all opportunities of the language like colloquial language, proverbs, idioms and slang, and humour and irony in its all depth. In parallel with the break Second New made in Turkish poetry, poetry of Eloğlu underwent changes in which the meaning goes down from the surface structure to deep structure and to one that is created mostly through unusual words, expressions and assimilation. This change is likely to date back to the beginning of the 1960s, when the book Horozdan Korkan Oğlan was published. To determine the characteristics of Metin Eloğlu’s poetry, the relations the poet established with the divan and folk poetry/narratives were examined and his views on the nature and characteristics of poetry are gathered together. The main purpose of the thesis is to show the mentioned change through an evaluation of his poems in terms of content and rhetoric. This thesis conludes that the main feature of the modernist change in Eloğlu’s poetry is an attempt of re-producing the language via poetry through studying and expanding Turkish vocabulary and possibilities of expression; and in parallel with this, the content turns to individual from social.