Turkish Poetry: Ottoman Divan Verse to Nazim Hikmet
Quick answer: Turkish poetry from Yunus Emre and Ottoman divan masters to Nazim Hikmet, the Garip movement, and the Second New: a guide to the tradition's craft.
Turkish poetry has always run on two tracks. In the palace, Ottoman divan poets wrote in aruz, the quantitative metre borrowed from Persian and Arabic, filling ghazals with nightingales, roses, and wine. In the villages, wandering asik minstrels sang syllabic hece verse to the saz, plain and direct. The tension and traffic between these tracks made the tradition.
The folk track's founding voice is Yunus Emre, the thirteenth-century mystic whose Turkish hymns of divine love are so clear a child can follow them and so deep that scholars still argue over them. The palace track culminated in masters like Fuzuli and Baki, and the collision of both with modernity produced one of the twentieth century's great poets, Nazim Hikmet.
The landmarks: divan and folk masters
Divan poetry's summits include Fuzuli, whose sixteenth-century Leyla and Mecnun turned the Arabic love legend into Turkish tragedy; Baki, the lord of poets in Suleyman the Magnificent's court; Nedim, whose Tulip Era lyrics let real Istanbul pleasure into the stylised garden; and Sheyh Galib, whose Beauty and Love crowned the tradition with Sufi allegory just before its decline.
The asik line runs from Yunus Emre through Karacaoglan's earthy love songs, Pir Sultan Abdal's defiant Alevi hymns, and Dadaloglu's tribal protest, a living chain of singer-poets whose contests of improvisation continue in Anatolia today.
Revolution in the line: Hikmet, Garip, Second New
Nazim Hikmet, born 1902, broke every convention at once: influenced by Mayakovsky, he brought free verse, stepped lines, and industrial rhythm into Turkish, writing epics like Human Landscapes from My Country largely in prison, where his politics kept him for over a decade before exile. His late poems, tender lists of the world's ordinary gifts, are among the century's most translated.
In 1941, the Garip, or strange, movement of Orhan Veli Kanik, Oktay Rifat, and Melih Cevdet Anday stripped poetry of metre, rhyme, and ornament to honour the man in the street; Orhan Veli could make a poem from loving Istanbul with eyes closed. The Second New answered in the 1950s with dense, surreal lyricism: Cemal Sureya's erotic wit, Turgut Uyar's abundance, Edip Cansever's dramatic monologues, and Ece Ayhan's coded histories.
The craft: what Turkish poetry teaches
The tradition is a laboratory of register: aruz shows what imported prestige music can do; hece shows the power of native speech rhythm; Garip proves how far plainness can go; the Second New proves the counter-case for difficulty. Few literatures display the full dial so clearly within one century.
From Hikmet, poets everywhere can learn the long catalogue poem that stays personal, and the discipline of writing hope without sentimentality under punishing circumstances. From Yunus Emre: that mystical depth and simple diction are allies, not opposites.
The tradition today
Contemporary Turkish poetry stays central to public life: Hikmet's lines appear at protests and weddings alike, asik gatherings and poetry evenings persist across Anatolia, and Istanbul supports a dense scene of journals, slams, and festivals. Kurdish-language poetry within Turkey and a wide European diaspora keep expanding the map, and modern poets like Ilhan Berk and Gulten Akin continue to gain international readers in translation.
What poets can take from this
- Read Yunus Emre and Sheyh Galib together to see the same mysticism in opposite registers.
- Try a Garip-style poem: no metaphors, no ornament, one ordinary moment honoured exactly.
- Write a Hikmet-style catalogue of things you did not know you loved until now.
- Study Orhan Veli for endings that shrug and still break the heart.
- Alternate drafting in strict syllabics and free verse to find where your own voice sits on the dial.
Try it yourself
Write a poem from confinement, real or figurative, a hospital, a job, a lockdown memory, that spends its lines cataloguing what you love about the unreachable outside.
Questions
What is divan poetry?
Divan poetry is the Ottoman court tradition written in aruz metre with Persian and Arabic conventions, collected in volumes called divans. Fuzuli, Baki, Nedim, and Sheyh Galib are its greatest masters.
Why is Nazim Hikmet important?
Hikmet modernised Turkish poetry with free verse and epic scope, writing much of his work in prison and exile for his communist politics. He is Turkey's most translated poet and a major figure of world literature.
What was the Garip movement?
Garip, meaning strange, was a 1941 movement led by Orhan Veli Kanik that rejected metre, rhyme, and elevated language in favour of everyday speech and subjects. It democratised Turkish poetry almost overnight.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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