When “Ottoman” Was an Insult: Turkish Modernist Poets and their Critics

In 1954, Turkish poet Cemal Süreya published an unusual poem in one of the influential literary magazines of the period. “Gül” [Rose] describes a person’s psychic state as he wanders through a disorienting urban landscape. With its use of decontextualized imagery and striking reversals, this poem scandalized Turkey’s mid-century literary scene:

I’m crying right in the middle of the rose

As I die each evening in the middle of the street

Knowing neither what’s ahead or behind me

Sensing how your eyes fade in the darkness

Your eyes that sustain me

I take your hands and caress them until morning

Your hands are white again white again white

I’m scared of your hands being this white

A train occurs in the station a little

I’m sometimes a man who can’t find the station

I take the rose and rub it on my face

One way or another it had fallen onto the street

I clip my own wings

There’s blood, apocalypse, an instrument

And on the end of the pipe a brand new gypsy [1]

The streets of the city are menacing and the speaker cannot get his bearings. The language reflects this disorientation, as trains “occur” and musical instruments play people rather than the other way around. It is only the lover with the pale hands who provides any sense of stability, but even that is fleeting. Similarly, the rose from which the speaker emerges in the first stanza, and which he rubs against his face in the last, is a symbol of some kind but lacks a clear referent. The publication of “Gül,” a cryptic and challenging poem, marked the opening of a new era in Turkish poetry.

Literary critics scrambled to make sense of this new aesthetic, which was present not only in Süreya’s work but appeared simultaneously in the poems of several young writers based in Ankara and Istanbul. This was not a coordinated effort: most of the poets did not yet know each other. They issued no manifesto. Yet, unsurprisingly, the first step taken by the critics was to give order to this chaos. They named this new aesthetic İkinci Yeni or the “Second New.” Today, the work of Ece Ayhan (1931–2002), Edip Cansever (1928–1986), Cemal Süreya (1931–1990), Turgut Uyar (1927–1985), İlhan Berk (1918–2008), and other poets is still known under this moniker. While they are now canonical poets in Turkey, seen as representatives of a homegrown modernism, in the 1950s and 1960s the Second New was the subject of a vitriolic literary debate. Among charges of elitism and obscurity, one insult stands out: for the Second New’s detractors, this poetry represented a dangerous revival of the poetry of the Ottoman Empire.

This essay explores how “Ottoman” came to be an epithet in mid-century Turkish literary circles. It asks how a body of poetry pushing the boundaries of grammar and syntax, and exploring themes of alienation and desire in rapidly modernizing urban spaces, got slapped with the label of a bygone empire. “Like many historical symbols,” historian Nicholas Danforth writes, “the Ottoman Empire, which spanned three continents and six centuries, has proved amenable to a wide range of sometimes-contradictory interpretations.”[2] Formed in 1923, the young Republic of Turkey defined itself in opposition to the Ottoman Empire, of which it was a successor state. Yet more recent scholarship has shown that Turkey never rejected the Ottomans tout court but has long cherry-picked aspects of imperial history to support the national narrative. In the secularizing early Republic, for example, Sultan Mehmet II (1432–1481), the conqueror of Constantinople, was presented as a forward-thinking renaissance man, in line with the ideal of the enlightened, westernized Turkish citizen. Today, the conservative government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is reviving equally selective aspects of Ottoman identity. On both the level of foreign policy (Turkey’s efforts to project regional power in post-imperial lands from Syria to the Balkans) and popular culture (with Ottoman-themed soap operas instilling pride in the “glorious” past), the Ottoman Empire remains a crucial, though overdetermined, symbol.[3]

Here I take the case of mid-twentieth-century Turkish literary critics rejecting the Second New’s modernist poetry by calling it “Ottoman” to investigate what Laura Doyle calls the “layered histories” and “radioactive half-lives” of empire that often shape modernism.[4] As Doyle has written more recently, “literatures become reservoirs of a sedimented political consciousness,” which she also calls, following Fredric Jameson, “an inter-imperial political unconscious.”[5] Building on Doyle’s work, Sanja Bahun has explored the case of surrealists in Belgrade to describe how inter-imperial interactions give rise to “relations and affects” that create “geocognitive deposits.”[6] In the Turkish context, the label “Ottoman” can be seen as one of these geocognitive deposits from the past that continued to haunt the post-imperial present. Following a similar line of argument, in “Inter-imperial Dimensions of Turkish Literary Modernity,” Arif Camoglu discusses “to what extent and on what terms national aesthetics and politics contain the epistemological residues of the antagonized empire.”[7] Like Doyle’s “radioactive half-lives” and “sedimented political un/consciousness” or Bahun’s “geocognitive deposits,” Camoglu’s “epistemological residues”  is a powerful concept for understanding post-imperial contexts because it “calls into question the neatness of the divides between empire and nation, and hence between the past and the present” (Camoglu, “Inter-Imperial,” 449). In this article, I look at a similar example where these divides become fuzzy. But rather than horizontally and synchronically describing the way inter-imperial rivalries are registered through literature, the case of Second New poetry reveals a more vertical and diachronic dynamic: how the imperial past can shape post-imperial literary categories within a single national literature. And rather than poems themselves, like Süreya’s “Gül,” it is the literary criticism about this poetry that provides the best record of the “radioactive half-lives” of the Ottoman Empire. 

Despite this poetry’s clear engagement with twentieth-century urban life as apparent in Süreya’s “Rose,” Turkish literary critics denounced this style as a revival of Ottoman poetry, also called divan poetry after the name for a collection of works by a single author. For example, writer and critic Onat Kutlar argued that a “sneaky love for divan” lies at the heart of the Second New aesthetic.[8] Similarly, poet Günel Altıntaş asserted that the Second New was a “formalist, closed, and fugitive” literary tendency and that, like divan poetry which was most often produced in or for the Ottoman court, “nobody but its writers paid attention to it” (Bezirci, 2. Yeni, 47). One of the fiercest opponents of the Second New was left-wing critic Asım Bezirci. His 1973 book The Second New Incident (2. Yeni Olayı) accuses these poets of various literary sins: disconnection from tradition, formalism, distance from everyday speech, grammatical deformation, confusion of sense and perception, free association, abstraction, meaninglessness, imagism, irrationalism, and obscurity (46–7). Bezirci gives no shortage of examples (organized by category) of each of these phenomena. Describing the “deformation” characteristic of this poetry, for example, he quotes lines from İlhan Berk, “Ben derim sana olmak, seni yürümek / Besbelli seni büyümek kendimde” (I say to be to you, to stroll you / Clearly to flourish you inside me) (47).  In this line a dative suffix is used alongside the verb “to be” and the intransitive verb “yürümek” (walk/stroll) is made transitive. For Bezirci, to write like this meant to turn one’s back on society, the reader, and a common language. Therefore, the Second New resembles what this generation of Turkish literati, who had absorbed decades of auto-Orientalist discourse, saw as the obscure, elitist, and “Eastern” poetry of the Ottoman court.

To understand why Turkish literary critics could perceive a group of modernist poets as trying to revive Ottoman poetry, we need to go back in time a bit. The best entry into the Second New is its name. Two things are apparent from the appellation “second”: it rests on a claim of novelty, yet this novelty is already secondary to something that came before. Fredric Jameson describes the “irrepressible search for the break” and the infinitely repeatable invocation of newness as the ultimate “trope of modernity.”[9] But in the particular context of Turkey, the name “Second New” also points to a recurring break in Turkish literature since the late Ottoman Empire. According to critic Orhan Koçak, this literary history is punctuated by “successive outbursts of the New, with the ‘Second’ New as the last and the most drastic one in a long line of such breakthroughs.”[10] Koçak quips that, if we’re keeping track, the Second New actually represented the sixth or seventh repetition of this gesture of renewal.

Renewal implies that there has been a failure or decline to be overcome. From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, “Ottoman” was shorthand for this idea of failure. More specifically, as literary scholar Victoria Holbrook writes, “Ottoman poetry was reconstituted as a privileged signifier of the failing sultanate,” which, as the cliché goes, went from nearly knocking down the gates of Vienna in the sixteenth century to becoming the “sick man of Europe” in the nineteenth.[11] Yet when we look at the history of Ottoman poetry, it is clear that it is much more than a stand-in for territorial loss and economic decline. It was a rich tradition developed over centuries that drew on previous examples of Arabic and especially Persian literature. Divan poets made use of various poetic forms, including the ghazal, kaide (panegyric), and mesnevi (verse romance). They drew on a number of conventional tropes and images, most notably the rose garden, nightingale, and various parts of the beloved’s body (eyebrows, cheeks). A single poem was often meant to be read on multiple levels: profane, political, and sacred. The beloved could be an actual lover, the sovereign, and/or God. Successful poets often benefited from court patronage and sometimes bureaucrats or even the sultan himself moonlighted as poets. Some of the most famous names in Ottoman poetry include Bâkî (1526–1600) a master of divan tropes who wrote during the golden age of Süleyman the Magnificent, the more licentious and political Nedîm from the early eighteenth century, and the mystical Şeyh Gâlib (1757–1799) of the Mevlevi Sufi order. Despite the complexity and diversity of this history, scholar of divan poetry Walter Andrews writes, “in the official discourse of modern Turkey, Ottoman poetry is generally a symbol of reaction, counter-revolution, and anti-Westernism.”[12] Of interest to us here is less what Ottoman poetry actually was then how it came to be discursively mobilized after the fact, eventually used as a cudgel against the modernist Second New.[13]

Over time, literati in the Ottoman Empire and then Turkey came to agree that divan poetry was a problem. Beginning in 1839, a period of social and economic reform known as the Tanzimat (literally, “Reorganization”) transformed the empire. These reforms also inspired efforts to transform the empire’s literature. Ottoman intellectuals and writers like Namık Kemal (1840-1888) argued that a rational, modern state needed a rational, modern literature—one that traded (what they saw as) the metaphysical, abstract, and sensual character of Ottoman courtly poetry for positivist, realist, and concrete forms of literary expression that could edify the masses. Namık Kemal brought new themes into divan poetry by explicitly discussing social issues. There also began a long process of linguistic simplification that culminated, after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, in Turkey’s so-called Alphabet Revolution of 1928 (which traded the Perso-Arabic script for a modified Latin alphabet) and the formation in 1932 of the Turkish Linguistic Society (which aimed to ‘purify’ the language from Persian and Arabic loanwords). This was a process of what Camoglu calls “indigenization, which denoted . . . a Western-oriented modernization that delegitimized Eastern roots in the process of the formation of an authentic Turkish language and literature” (Camoglu, “Inter-imperial Dimensions,” 431). Hence, there was a kind of auto-Orientalism at the heart of this indigenizing literary project to bury Ottoman literature and make it the mother of all evils.[14] 

At the heart of “Turkish Orientalism,” as Edhem Eldem puts it, was the “dream was to become modern, secular, homogeneous, united and—white” (“Ottoman,” 29). Searching for a way to create this kind of “Western” nation out of the remnants of this “Eastern” empire, Turkey’s new rulers (like previous proponents of linguistic nationalism) looked to language as a unifying force. In Turkey as in Europe, the sources used for this kind literary nationalism were often rural. On the literary front, early Republican poets like the Five Syllabists (Beş Hececiler) replaced urbane, cosmopolitan Ottoman poetry written in quantitative meters inspired by Arabic prosody with the syllabic meters used in Anatolian folk poetry. Their poems used pastoral imagery and focused on themes like hardship, love, and loneliness. In a more abortive project, other poets tried to move Turkish poetry from “Iran to Yunan” (or Greece) by banking on Turkey’s Mediterranean location and claiming it as the true heir of classical Hellenic civilization and therefore already Western.[15] Then came a more radical attempt at renewal, one which did not rely on rural sources or civilizational narratives.

The First New, originally known as the Strange (Garip) movement, represented the apotheosis of these long efforts to westernize and modernize Turkish literature. From 1937 to 1945, Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Oktay Rifat challenged both late Ottoman and early Republican folk poetry conventions in favor of unrhymed free verse that used the language and narrated the experiences of the urban every-man. “I was so bored last night / two packs of cigarettes did nothing for me . . . Goddammit, in the end / I up and came here”: quotidian lines like these from Orhan Veli were made possible by the “catastrophic success” of the previous century of reforms.[16] For example, the poets’ 1941 joint manifesto “Strange” not only announced the uselessness of meter and rhyme but lamented that it was not “possible to dump even language itself,” for it was sedimented with a dead tradition that “forc[es] its vocabulary on us when we write poetry.”[17] Yet for all their iconoclasm, the First New poets were still focused on entertaining and edifying the common people by writing in an easily comprehensible language.

Enter the Second New. This last major renewal of Turkish poetry, which Nergis Ertürk calls “the most important modernist experiment of the century’s second half,” aimed at something radically different.[18] The Second New represented a movement towards an autonomous poetic language, declaring independence from the prosaic speech celebrated in the First New. Second New-associated poet İlhan Berk, for example, insisted that the poet’s first task must be to “rid poetry of everything external to it, to hold its own qualities in highest esteem.”[19] He described his poetry as a rebellion against “word-based poetry”:  poetry that contains a clear, single meaning written to facilitate understanding. Similarly, Cemal Süreya argued that “Modern poets shake up words, they dislodge them from place and from their meanings.”[20] This new aesthetic broke poetry up into words and then into their component phonemes, which were in turn recombined to create new words. This can be seen in the title of Süreya’s 1958 collection Üvercinka, which combines the word for pigeon [güvercin] and the word for woman [kadın] in a portmanteau. Through these experiments with language, Turkish regained a new level of complexity after the trauma of the language reforms and the state-enforced liquidation of the Ottoman literary tradition—something like a forest’s slow regaining of species diversity after a clear-cut.

And so, far from attempting to revive Ottoman poetry or create a clear-spoken and edifying national literature, the Second New poets were seeking to create an autonomous language. This does not mean, however, that their poetry remained oblivious to Turkey’s historical and social transformations in the 1950s when the poetry first emerged.[21] Though they were mostly concerned with themes related to the modern metropolis, these poets also did occasionally engage with the Ottoman literary tradition, but never uncritically. Süreya, for example, saw it as “imperial poetry” in which the poet was part of the “established order,” though he argued that certain late poets like Şeyh Galip were harbingers of modernism.[22] Cansever, in contrast, had no interest in the divan tradition, calling it “artificial and static.”[23] Others selectively drew on it. In 1970, Uyar published a book titled Divan in which he used forms like the ghazal and rubaʿi. Yet he argued, like the left-wing literary critics who disliked the Second New, that “the culture left over from the Ottoman Empire cannot nourish us.”[24] Uyar was not attempting to imitate Ottoman poetry with this collection but rather to put its forms to a new and political use in the context of Turkey’s ascendant socialist movement of the 1960s—it was a people’s divan. The poet Berk, in contrast, wrote two collections, Aşıkane (1968) and Şenlikname (1972), that drew on Ottoman themes and poetic forms but these must be seen within his larger interest in world civilizations and literature from the Phoenicians and Byzantines to Cavafy and Neruda. Sezai Karakoç, a devout Muslim poet sometimes associated with the Second New, was most interested in divan poetry. He believed Turkish writers should draw on the Ottoman past for “spiritual revivalism,” though even he argued that simply reviving the forms of Ottoman poetry was not an option for modern poets.[25]

And so when left-wing critics slandered the Second New as a reactionary revival of Ottoman poetry, the center of the debate was not actually the Ottoman Empire at all—it was modernism. To challenge the legitimacy of literary modernism and its search for aesthetic autonomy, critics combined the Turkish state’s tradition of auto-Orientalist anti-Ottomanism with Soviet-inspired socialist realism. The anti-Second New critic Bezirci, for example, was a proponent of the clear-spoken and directly political poetry of Nâzım Hikmet and the communist poets who followed in his footsteps. Bezirci’s main charge against the Second New was its supposed refusal to deal with the realities of social life, which he attributes to its “formalism.” In terms reminiscent of the principles of socialist realism put forward during the famous Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, Bezirci saw İkinci Yeni’s use of language as meaningless and irrational. In fact, the polemics over the Second New, with its pro- and anti-modernist sides, are also highly reminiscent of the famous 1930s-1940s debate among Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and György Lukács. Caused by a disagreement over the legacy of Germany Expressionism, these Marxist thinkers carried on a sustained debate over the aesthetics of revolutionary art.[26] It is no coincidence that the arguments used against the Second New resemble those of Lukács in particular, for his concept of critical realism was an important influence on the left in Turkey.[27]

Yet Bezirci did not describe the supposed irrationalism of the Second New as proto-fascist for being anti-rational, as Lukács did with the modernist writers he critiqued.[28] Nor did he describe modernists as “degenerate,” as actual fascists did, for example during the Nazi’s anti-modernist Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937. Rather, in a form of “strategic Orientalism,” to use Camoglu’s term, Bezirci chose to describe modernist poets as neo-Ottoman, a term more resonant in the Turkish context (Camoglu, Inter-imperial, 446).[29] For example, in The Second New Incident Bezirci writes:

[Like the Second New], divan poets also turned their backs on the people and its culture, aligning themselves with the palace and addressing its hegemonic tastes, preferences, and interests. Just like them, İ[lhan] Berk and T[urgut] Uyar . . . express the perspective and emotions of their own class. Though they, too, are distant from the people, they side less with the ruling class and more so with the petite bourgeoisie (167).

For Bezirci, the similarity between Ottoman poetry and the Second New was more about poetry’s social function than its form. He admitted that Second New poets were not actually trying to recreate this imperial literary tradition. In fact, he correctly thought that Second New poets were more inspired by modern European and North American trends in poetry than Ottoman or Persian poets—they were more likely to read Mallarmé or Eliot than Nefʾi or Saadi. Rather, what his opposition to this poetry shows is that, in the cultural common sense of mid-twentieth-century Turkey, the Second New poets did commit one grave sin: they rejected the idea that literature’s primary function was to unambiguously support political ends, whether the socialist goals of Bezirci and his colleagues or the state-building project of the Turkish Republic.

In the early republic, literature was expected to contribute to creating a secular state on the Western European bourgeois model. In that context, as literary scholar Victoria Holbrook writes, “Ottoman poetry could serve as an allegory for the political failure of the Ottoman state.”[30] In other words, the Ottoman Empire failed partly because its literature was apolitical, useless, and “Eastern.” However, by the mid-century mark, Turkey’s rulers were no longer as anxious about Ottoman cultural heritage and in fact began celebrating it (for example during the 500th anniversary of the conquest of Istanbul in 1953). Yet Turkish socialists like Bezirci had absorbed the symbolic universe of Kemalist nationalism, in which anti-Ottomanism played an important role. And while the state had relaxed its demands of literature and art more generally by this point, even strategically celebrating artistic modernism as a straightforward symbol of how “modern” Turkey had become as a nation, for socialist literary critics Ottoman poetry was still a meaningful specter, especially as the conservative Demokrat Parti flirted with popular expressions of Islam and partially rehabilitated the Ottoman past throughout the 1950s—all while pushing forward a pro-NATO, pro-capitalist agenda.[31]

And so in this mid-twentieth-century context, the signifier “Ottoman poetry” was given additional meanings besides the failure of the Ottoman state and the need for a positivist and edifying literature for the state-building project.  Left-wing critics had adapted it  into a symbol for the failure of petit bourgeois poets to explicitly embrace the socialist project in their work. In this way, through a similar “process of (psychic) condensation, [by which] the sign Ottoman poetry [became] an overdetermined symbol of imperial failure," as Holbrook writes, in the 1950s Ottoman poetry became a symbol of reactionary literature (“Philology,” 26). Strategic Orientalism had become wedded to socialist realism as “Ottoman” came to mean “formalism” [biçimcilik], one of the biggest transgressions according to committed critics in Turkey and their socialist realist counterparts elsewhere.

No matter that the majority of the Second New poets were themselves socialists—some, like Edip Cansever, even card-carrying members of the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP)—and occasionally expressed explicit political tendencies in their poems. This debate over the Second New, while seemingly centered on Ottoman literature, was—like the German Expressionism debate—really about the relationship between aesthetics and politics. What Second New and divan poets shared, in the view of socialist critics, was a rejection of the primary demand that literature be rational, easily understandable, engagé, and edifying.

Second New poets typically had little interest in educating anyone. In this assessment, Bezirci and the other critics of the Second New were spot-on. But today it is uncontroversial to note that rejecting the instrumentalization of literature for politics can itself be a political gesture—not in the sense of explicitly political content, as socialist critics and before them state reformers expected from literature, but in the work’s form. In other words, the Second New poets played Adorno to the socialist critics’ Lukács. It was the Second New’s rejection of politics that made their poetry politically significant, even when (as Adorno says of Samuel Beckett in Aesthetic Theory) the work contains “not a single political word.”[32]

For this reason, the most illuminating scholarly reprisals of the debate over the Second New center on the question of aesthetic autonomy. Yalçın Armağan, for example, argues that attempts to found a national Turkish literature were based in a fundamental opposition to autonomy.[33] Of course, by the mid-twentieth century in Western Europe and North America, asserting the autonomy of literature was an uncontroversial gesture. Yet as Gregory Jusdanis has famously shown in his work on national aesthetic culture in Greece, inspiring later generations of scholars working on locations outside of Western Europe, “aesthetic autonomy, the determining feature of western literature, does not necessarily characterize all cultures.”[34] Or else aesthetic autonomy gains legitimacy late or unevenly. In Turkey, it was only in the 1950s that the conditions of possibility arose for a major literary current to reject what Jusdanis calls the “integration of literature into social struggles,” thereby declaring its independence from the national project (9). What made the Second New truly “new,” in the Turkish context, was this insistence on autonomy. And anti-modernist Turkish critics trying to discredit this understanding of literature used the best weapon they had on hand: Ottoman divan poetry. In this way, by the mid-century, the ghost of Ottoman poetry, which had continued to haunt the Turkish Republic, became a symbol for the supposed irrationality and apolitical nature of modernism.

Exploring why Turkish critics called the Second New “Ottoman” is just one example of how the “sedimented political [un]consciousness,” as Doyle put it, continued to shape literature in the post-imperial age of nation states. But the example of the Second New also reveals how the meaning of these imperial remainders can shift over time within a single national context, as the political unconscious of divan poetry changed meaning in Turkey from the literary nationalism of the westernizing 1920s to the socialist realism of the 1950s.

The auto-Orientalist use of “Ottoman” as a pejorative in Turkey evolved over time. It went from being official state rhetoric to being a part of beleaguered socialist circles that were frequently targeted by the state. However, it does reveal a certain consistency in Turkey’s institution of literature. Registering this evolution and consistency can provide new pathways for understanding modernism in post-imperial contexts. As Nergis Ertürk writes in Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, Turkey was “[h]aunted doubly by the external difference of an encroaching ‘Europe’ and by the internal difference of atrophied and mortified Ottoman imperial multilingualism.”[35] Faced with these threats, “Turkish modernity is distinguished by the extremity of measures taken for the control of writing, in the establishment of an impossibly self-same or self-identical identity (Nergis, Grammatology, xiv).” And it is precisely this self-sameness and control of writing that the Second New challenged with its bold declaration of autonomy and linguistic playfulness. By the 1950s the Turkish state was no longer focused on using literature to create a national self, but Turkish socialist critics used the sediments of anti-Ottomanism to try and wrest control of writing back against the new threat of modernism.