Natural Poetry: Conceptualizing A Poetic Quest in the Late Ottoman Period

The aim of this study is to reveal the scope of the term natural poetry as a concept, which is frequently encountered in poetic texts published in the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century. Naturalness has been transformed into a useful tool for the poetics of new poetry due to its positive connotations such as natural, non-artificial, spontaneous, normal. After Tanzimat, when a new poetic tradition was intended to replace classical poetry, naturalness was conceptualized to emphasize that the new poetry was the normal and natural style of poetry. According to the innovators, the poetic devices of classical poetry distort the naturalness of text and discourse. The desired new poetry is to be purified from the artificialities and excesses of the old poetry. For this purpose, it is necessary to return to the syllabic meter, which is an indigenous verse, to get rid of the artificial discourse of classical poetry and to revive our own poetic tradition. At this point, the concept of natural poetry was started to be used by the innovators to express the new poetry that had attained natural expression, got rid of the aruz meter, and was produced easily and without artifice. However, each poet seems to point to a different dimension of the new poetics to be constructed with the concept of natural poetry. In this article, what the poets wanted to express with the concept of natural poetry will be explained and the differences in the use of the concept will be emphasized. Thus, the poetic renewal after Tanzimat will be evaluated in the light of the concept of natural poetry in terms of poetic goals.