Nazim Hikmet Poetry Analysis

After his death, Hikmet 's books began to reappear in Turkey; in 1965 and 1966, for example, more than twenty of his books were published there, some of them reprints of earlier volumes and others works appearing for the first time. The next fifteen years saw the gradual publication of his eight volume Collected Poems, along with his plays, novels, letters, and even children 's stories. At the same time, various selections of his poems went through multiple printings, and numerous biographies and critical studies of his poetry were published. But except for brief periods between 1965 and 1980, his work has been suppressed in his native country for the past half century. Since his death, major translations of his poetry has continued to

On the other hand, Nazim Hikmet was not only open to folk poetry and classical Turkish poetry, but he also took some elements from world poetry, of Western and Eastern poetry. Especially in his verse that he wrote after 1921 we can see influences of the left wing of Russian futurists and of constructivists. However, Nazim Hikmet was able to rid himself of these influences in his creative crucible of strong personality. In the same way he also made use of Western poetry. He crystallised the sources which he found useful and could be taken as a sample with a critical eye and injected this into his poetry. Hikmet combined Turkish traditional poetry with avant-gardist trends, and deeply influenced Turkish literature in the 1920s and 1930s. His own passionate poetic voice Hikmet found in his twenties. He proclaimed that "the artist is the engineer of the human soul." In 1936 he published one of his most famous works, The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin, which depicted a 15th century revolutionary religious leader in Anatolia. Among his later major works is the five-volume Human Landscapes From My Country 1966-67, a 20,000 line epic. In his early poems Hikmet never used completely free verse. Typical for his poems is change of metre and irregular use