REFLECTIONS ON POETRY

The real poet is not engaged in his love, his happiness or pain. In such poet's poems his people's pulse should beat... The poet, in order to be successful, should in his poems shed light on the material life. One who escapes from real life and thus treats of unrelated subjects, is destined to burn like straw. (Babayef, Nâzım Hikmet, pp. 140-41)

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The new poet does not define separate languages such as the language of poetry, the language of metre, or everyday language. He writes in one language alone: in a language that is not made-up, fake and artificial, but a live, spacious, colourful, deep and plain. This language involves all the components of life. The poet's personality is not different when he is writing poems from when he is talking or fighting! The poet is not a degenerate who pretends he is floating up in the clouds, but a citizen who organises life as he is living it. (Babayef, Nâzım Hikmet, p. 141)

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The poet's world should at least be as large as a novelist's. Look, there are many apt young men in our poetry circles but for the most part they inhabit very narrow worlds; they are short of breath. And in order to conceal their state of narrow-mindedness and breathlessness, they claim that they listen carefully to their inner-world. Although they may be distinct in terms of methodology, in reality there are not such things as inner-world and outer-world. The inner-world of the poet, in fact, is nothing but the reflection of the outer-world. That is why one who has a narrow outer-world would have a narrower inner world. (Memet Fuat'a Mektuplar, ['Letters to Memet Fuat'], p. 70)

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The artist, the painter, the poet, the novelist, the architect, the actor, etc., above all are human beings. Before anything else, a human being is not an abstract being but a concrete one. That is to say that every human being exists in a definite and determined historical period, in a definite society, and belonging to a definite social class. Otherwise, in general, there is nothing like an abstract human being or any meaning. I think I have mentioned this before in many of my letters but I do want you to understand this subject very well. Thus now, because of this, an artist is a concrete human being. He has a determined physiology, a definite physiological and biological material structure. This structure lives in a definite historical period in a definite society and in that definite society there are various classes and layers. An artist produces his work under these circumstances. Starting with his birth, all these factors I have enumerated, influence the artist. And his material-personal structure reflects the impressions he has received from his concrete environment according to the period he lives in and according to the society and class to which he belongs. But this process of reflection, although based on this content, is bounded by the technical opportunities of the tools, paints, words or notes he uses. Thus, taking the content as a basis, there is a mutual influence between the content and the form. [...] The relationship between the poet and his environment is not a passive relation. In other words, the poet not only determines but what he determines influences his social environment and gradually becomes a motive in his own change. (Memet Fuat'a Mektuplar,['Letters to Memet Fuat'], pp. 61-62)

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In every country and in every era, we come across avant-garde artists who struggle against the dark forces of their periods. These avant-garde artists, who struggle for the happiness of the people and for a beautiful life in the world, have always been besieged, investigated, oppressed and murdered by those dark forces. But they know that no oppression and threat, no death or lie is capable of stopping the course of history and its direction toward the better, the more beautiful, the more just and toward happiness. And the works of these authors and their entire lives become models for the next generations. (Babayef, Nâzım Hikmet, p. 140)

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First of all, as a problem of methodology, one should accept the following fact: it is from the form to the essence, not to the content; it is from the content, from the essence to the form. The content comes first, not the form. It is the content that determines the form. But, of course, this is true in terms of methodology; else, form and content constitute a unity. But in this unity, although they influence each other mutually, the determining component is the content. [...] A rule which declares that rhyme and meter should be used absolutely, like other absolute rules and abstract claims, causes fanaticism. Similarly, accepting the harmony of the language of speech as the absolute and abstract fundamental principle is a kind of fanaticism. Denying rhyme and meter absolutely and with an abstract point of view, and accepting, in general, something like the harmony of the language of speech and refusing and denying other possibilities of harmony is not novelty but the reactionism of those who do not accept any kind of harmony other than rhyme and meter. [...] There are such contents that are not in need of rhyme; the harmony of the language of speech ¾sometimes of the townsman, sometimes of the countryman, of the intellectual, of the worker, of the rowdy, of the housewife, etc.-is sufficient and the most appropriate. But also, there are a number of contents that need rhyme¾rhyme may also vary; the possibilities of rhyme are also limitless-and there are those that the language of speech is not sufficient so that they need a wider, a more abstract and perhaps because of this a more colourless language. As a result, you may multiply these examples as much as you can. But just be aware of something, do not be embedded in dogmatism; in youth, one may think that it is a good thing to be embedded in dogmatism, in constant, eternal truths, and to be accepting of them. As you know, for years, I have written unrhymed poems, poems using different kinds of the language of speech, poems containing lots of pictures or no pictures, poems in a bookish language, using different sorts of rhyme. As a result, I tried to find the most suitable form to my content, to that poem, to that definite and concrete content. I do not think that I did something that was wrong. In general, the misery of our poetry today-despite the fact that one sometimes encounters very beautiful things-is the fact that our poets are embedded in two kinds of reactionism that are opposite to each other at a turning point, that is to say they are embedded in motionlessness or lifelessness by taking the kind of form they accept as the only basis. (Memet Fuat'a Mektuplar,['Letters to Memet Fuat'], pp. 52-53)

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There was no opportunity for me to read my poems in a loud voice on theatre stages to the workers. [...] This situation influenced both the content and the form of my poetry. Besides utilising absolute rhyme and surprising fantastic elements in a number of poems like "Kerem," and in satires above all, in general, the lyric element¾I do not mean the element of love¾increasingly became more powerful and the rhymes softened and thus the language became the speech of the poet with one or more people. [...]
International events were still of importance in my poetry. I had to shroud these, under the circumstances of the country at the times, with a kind of fog; it was the only way in which I could suppress them. [...]
The last of this sequence of poems is "The Epic of Şeyh Bedreddin." In this poem, I think, elements of the folk metre and the Ottoman Diwan poetry are used to the utmost. On the other hand, in the form this book, I, in a way, weighed up all the possibilities of form. [...]
I think, after this book, and particularly after I was imprisoned, the problems of form became much more clarified in my head. First of all, I do not deny any possibility and kind of form. [...] I want to adapt the form to the essence in such a way that the form would define the content once more but itself, i.e., the form would not become definitive. This should be something like the stockings that make a woman's beautiful legs much more beautiful but they themselves do not appear to view. This is what I prefer today but it is certain that sometime later I may prefer varicoloured forms. [...]
Our biggest enemy is sectarianism. Sectarianism is a kind of nihilism. A sectarian denies all except one, his pleasure; he denies all other thought. Especially when form is considered, the harms of sectarianism are innumerable. Those who claim that one cannot write poetry with rhyme and metre are as reactionary as those who argue that poetry cannot be without rhyme and metre. Poetry can be written in either way. The language of literature emerges with images, similes, etc. But arguing that this kind of language is poetic language is as erroneous as it is to deny this argument. In my youth, I was also a sectarian. After I had written poems with folk metre and rhyme I started to search for novelty in form. Thus I started to write in what was for me a kind of blank verse. But at the basis of this, again, there were the metres of folk poetry and even aruz. This was the same in terms of rhyme and language but I argued that poetry could be written only in this way and that this was the unique form for poetry. For a long time, I did not write love poems. Furthermore, I did not use the word 'heart' in my poems, just because of the fact that the heart is the symbol of feelings, not the mind. At times, I ran after the most colourful and harmonious forms. I thought that if I said in these poems what I wanted to tell the people, my poems would be liked more, listened to more easily and that they would be more moving. At other times, on the contrary, I wanted to present my 'folk song' in the plainest, the most indifferent of styles. Both are necessary as are and also many others. The artist should unceasingly, unto death, search for the most suitable forms to present his 'folk song'. Sometimes, this kind of research results only in a headache that lasts for months, and in anxiety. Well, let it be. [...]
Now, I utilise all kinds of forms. I write with public metre and also with rhyme. I also do the opposite. I write poems using the simplest everyday language, unrhymed, and without metre. I talk about love, peace, revolution, life, death, happiness, sorrow, hope and hopelessness; I want everything peculiar to life to be peculiar to my poetry. I want the reader to be able to find the expression of all his feelings in my poetry or in ours. When one wants to read a poem on the 1st of May, he should read us; similarly, when he wants to read on his unreturned love he should search for our books. (Babayef, "Nâzım Hikmet Kendi şiirini Anlatıyor", ['Nâzım Hikmet on His Own Poetry'], pp. 180-86)



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