Tevfik Fikret’s ‘Person Poems’

Tevfik Fikret created a huge poetry collection with his poems that he wrote for most of his forty-eight year of life. He embraced a wide variety of themes in his poems. One of them is his feelings and thoughts for different people. It is possible to call them "person poems" and to create a new thematic category. In this study, the theme in question was examined in the light of Tevfik Fikret's poems. In addition, his several person poems' that are not included in his collection are also included in the scope of the study. Having written a total of forty-four ‘person poems', Fikret mostly wrote poems for people from his literary community. There are sixteen men /women of letters in this group. It is noteworthy that almost all of them are poets. Only Ahmet Midhat is a novelist; his admission to Fikret's repertoire on this theme is related to his famous Decadents discussion. His mother, father, sister and son are the people who Fikret wrote poems for from his family circle. Fikret wrote most of his poems for his son Halûk from this circle. Adding color to his father's life with his birth, in the eyes of his father Halûk became an ideal representative of the youth who would overcome the difficulties that the country was facing in the poems Fikret wrote after 1911. Politics and statesmen were also included in Fikret's ‘person poems’. Among them, Abdulhamit II leads the way. 'Person poem has an important place in the theme repertoire of Tevfik Fikret, who reflects the dimensions of his objector identity to almost every area from society to religion, from literature to the state. In this respect, it should be positioned as a thematic title in his poetry universe. This theme also has a wide place in Turkish poetry. When the study titled Person Poems in New Turkish Literature prepared by us is published as a book, the limits of the said width will emerge more clearly.

Keywords

New Turkish literature, Tevfik Fikret, person poem, portrait poem, Servet-i Fünun, satire.