Nazım Hikmet Essay

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Murat Culduz 51081026 ELL 506 Assist Prof Agnes E. Brandabur The Most Controversial Turkish Poet; Nazım Hikmet Ran Introduction Although there are billions of people in the world, only a few of them can realize themselves during their lifetime.Those who can realize themselves during their lifetime are, at the same time, the happiest and the unhappiest people all over the world. This paper is going to focus on one of them, a poet who realized himself -Nazım Hikmet RAN -who is still one of the most controversial and –in my opinion- the best poet of all times. By universal agreement he is the greatest literary figure the Turkish Republic has produced. He was a poet, playwright and novelist, extravagantly gifted and fervently patriotic, he was also a Communist who spent much of his life in jail and died in exile in 1963 after having been stripped of his Turkish citizenship[1]. Although his poems were banned in Turkey for years, every Turkish citizen knows his name .That is because of his universal thought and mastery of Turkish language. He wrote his poems about 40 years ago, but his language was so pure and intelligible that even in today’s Turkey his poems can be understood by younger generations. In order to understand his poetry better, it is essential to be familiar with his extraordinary life, diverse personality, and idealistic being. Nazım Hikmet’s Life: Born in Salonika in 1902, Nazim Hikmet was descended from a cosmopolitan Ottoman family. He grew up in Istanbul, where his father was in the Foreign Service. His mother was an artist, and his pasha grandfather wrote poetry. Thanks to his family’s circle of friends Hikmet was introduced to poetry early, managing to publish his first collection of poems () at seventeen. As a youth, he attended the Turkish naval academy, but during the Allied occupation of Istanbul following the First World War, he left

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