Abstract
Recaizade Ekrem’s Ghazals
This article focuses on the characteristics of Recaizade Ekrem’s ghazals. Most of Recaizade Ekrem’s ghazals were written with a classical approach. Ekrem brought the ghazal to life in the 19th century Ottoman literature, where the classical ghazal tradition lost its dominance seriously. As it is known, the ghazal is beyond being a classical verse, it is the carrier of a mentality from generation to generation. It is possible to interpret Recaizade's revival of the ghazal as an anxious view of the lost. This is how Ekrem paid his duty of loyalty to the literary culture from which he came. Recaizade Ekrem's addition of ghazals to his books, which include the most innovative poems in which Western poets meet the horizon of thought, by saying "I can't give up on tagazzül", in other words, his approach that always reminds himself of classical poetry accumulation in the process of building the new, should look for features such as opening up space for differences and versatility which are the general character of his literary understanding. Continuing the old did not create a psychological resistance to the new in his art, and the considerable number of his classical poems was not exposed to negative criticism in the literary conjuncture of the period. Recaizade, like other members of the Tanzimat era generation, who explained the innovation with the existence of a tradition whose influence in poetry was diluted, also made changes on classical verse forms. Ghazal is the leading among among these verse forms. Ekrem's ghazals not only reflect Recaizade's methodology on literary innovation, as the founder of new Turkish poetry, but also contain clues about the psychological and sociological orientation of his period.
Keywords
Poem form, ghazal, Recaizade Ekrem, classical poetry.