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Poetry (a term derived from the Greek word poiesis, "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition ...
- History of Poetry
The character which means "poetry", in the ancient Chinese...
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- History of Poetry
Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time of the Romantic revolution, when William Wordsworth challenged the distinction in his Romantic ...
Feb 29, 2024 · Poetry is a condensed form of writing. As an art, it can effectively invoke a range of emotions in the reader. It can be presented in a number of forms — ranging from traditional rhymed poems such as sonnets to contemporary free verse. Poetry has always been intrinsically tied to music and many poems work with rhythm.
Guide to Poetic Terms. This is a list of terms for describing texts, with an emphasis on terms that apply specifically to poetry, that appear most frequently in literary criticism, or for which dictionary definitions tend to be unenlightening.
- Overview
- Epic and the emergence of the âşik
- Sufi poetry
- Poetry of the Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–1839)
Turkish literature, the body of written works in the Turkish language.
The Orhon inscriptions represent some of the earliest extant writing in Turkish. These inscriptions appear on two monuments built in the early 8th century ce in northern Mongolia. Other early Turkish writing includes poetry in an 11th-century Turkish-Arabic dictionary by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutudgu bilig (“Knowledge Which Leads to Happiness”) by Yusuf Khass Hajib, which uses poetic forms from the Arabic and Persian literary traditions. During the later 13th century, what came to be known as Turkish literature was produced primarily in Mongol-controlled Anatolia. Among the numerous Turkic dynasties of Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, only the post-Mongol Anatolian states and then the Ottoman Empire maintained Turkish as a literary language. From the 14th through the early 20th century, writing in Turkish flourished in the Ottoman Empire, and it subsequently continued in the Turkish republic. Despite changes in language and culture from the Mongol and Ottoman periods to the emergence of modern-day Turkey, Turkish literature has remained an important means of expression for the Turkish-speaking peoples of Anatolia and the adjacent areas of the Balkans. Much of this region’s literary activity has centred on Istanbul, its central urban metropolis since the mid-15th century.
The oldest genre of Turkish literature is the heroic epic, of which the prime example is the Kitab-i Dede Korkut (“The Book of My Grandfather Korkut”; Eng. trans. The Book of Dede Korkut), which has survived in two 16th-century manuscripts. The actual date of the work is unknown. At least one of the tales was already circulating in written form in the early 14th century, and Central Asian sources suggest that the shaman-bard Korkut and his tales date from the 9th and 10th centuries. The style of the epic—which consists of prose narrative mixed with verse speeches—suggests oral composition. The language of the text is Oghuz Turkish, containing both Anatolian and Azerbaijani elements. There is no overall narrative framework, but most of the 12 tales revolve around legendary Oghuz heroes. The original poem (if not the 16th-century manuscripts) was evidently created by an oral bard, or ozan, the heir to a partly shamanic tradition, although the circumstances of the epic’s transformation to written literature are unknown, and the work as such had no influence on the subsequent development of Turkish literature. Both manuscripts known at the turn of the 21st century were discovered in Europe, the larger one in Germany in the early 19th century. Yet Turkish interest in the Book of Dede Korkut emerged nearly a century after significant German and Russian work. In the 20th century major studies of the text were undertaken in Turkey, Russia, and Azerbaijan as well as in Europe.
Much of the style of the Book of Dede Korkut predates the heroic tradition of the Oghuz Turkish poet-musician known as the âşik, who emerged in the 16th century in Anatolia, Iran, and the southern Caucasus and eventually supplanted the ozan. The âşik (ashoog in Azerbaijani; from the Arabic ʿashiq, “lover” or “novice Sufi”) was a professional or semiprofessional performer, singing a variety of epic, didactic, mystical, and lyrical songs to the accompaniment of a long-necked lute (saz). The classical âşik of the Anatolian Turkmen tribes was Karacaoğlan, who flourished in the later 16th century or possibly the mid-17th century (his date of death is sometimes given as 1679). He is mentioned in several biographical dictionaries (tezkires) of the period. In its formal qualities his poetry is closely related to folk verse, and he generally treats lyrical themes without the mystical subtext that was common in courtly verse of the period. His style influenced such 17th-century âşiks as Âşik Ömer of Aydin and Gevherî, as well as the âşiks of the 18th century.
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Poetry: First Lines
By the middle of the 13th century, mystical (Sufi) poetry had become a major branch of Turkish literature, with Sufi poets working primarily in Anatolian Turkish. One of the two well-known poets of the 13th and 14th centuries was Âşık Paşa, author of the Garībnāmeh (“The Book of the Stranger”), a didactic poem of some 11,000 couplets that explores philosophical and moral themes. It is considered among the finest mesnevîs (Persian: mas̄navīs) of the era. Yunus Emre, author of a divan and of the didactic mesnevî Risâletʿün nushiyye (“Treatise of Counsel”), was the period’s other well-known poet. Despite Yunus Emre’s evident scholastic learning, he wrote in a language and style that appealed to popular taste. His poetry was read and studied in Ottoman times, and it remains central today to the dhikr ceremony of ritual prayer practiced by Sunni brotherhoods (tarikats) and to the ayîn-i cem ritual of the Alevî Bektashi, an order of tribal Shīʿite Sufis.
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Later in the 13th century Seyid İmadeddin Nesimi, probably of southeast Anatolia, created brilliant Sufi verse in Persian and in a form of Turkish rather closer to Azerbaijani. The 15th century saw a split between heterodox Sufi tendencies, as seen in the verse of Kaygusuz Abdal, and the orthodox Sufism of Eşrefoğlu Rumi. Like Yunus Emre, Eşrefoğlu wrote verse in which the Sufi poet functions as a charismatic and sacred figure who writes poetry in order to communicate his sacerdotal authority to his disciples. By the early 16th century, this style of poetry, generally known as ilâhî (“divine”), was practiced by such sheikh-poets as İbrahim Gülşeni and his son Gülşenîzâde Hayali as well as Muslihiddin Merkez, Muhiddin Uftade, Seyyid Seyfullah Nizamoğlu, and Aziz Mahmud Hüdâyî. The growth during the 16th and 17th centuries of this type of poetry, which was intended to be sung in the dhikr ceremony, was a function of the monopoly over mysticism held by the Sufi brotherhoods of that era. The most outstanding representative of this tradition is Niyazi Mısri, a 17th-century poet of the Halvetiye tarikat. His verse was enormously popular in his lifetime and throughout the 18th century. Like Yunus Emre, Niyazî Misrî was able to express subtle mystical insights using very simple language:
I was seeking a cure for my trouble;
My trouble became my cure.
While the Ottomans wrote a great deal of prose (especially on history, theology, mysticism, biography, and travel), poetry was the focus of literary thought; hence, the following discussion will confine itself to verse. The forms, genres, and themes of pre-Ottoman and Ottoman Turkish literature—those works written between about 1300 and 1839, the y...
- Walter Feldman
Mar 1, 2024 · Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or an emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm. Poetry is a vast subject, as old as history, present wherever religion is present, and possibly the primal form of languages themselves.
Dec 13, 2014 · Turkish Literature. The history of Turkic literature spans a period of nearly 1,500 years. The oldest extant records of written Turkic are the Orhon inscriptions, found in the Orhon River valley in central Mongolia and dating to the 8th century. Subsequent to this period, between the 9th and 11th centuries, there arose among the nomadic Turkic ...
