Abstract:

The most important factor of Turkish modernization, when considered on the scale of our intellectuals, is the effort to emulate the west. The adventure of westernization, which has been going on since the Tanzimat, makes its presence felt not only in the political, economic and military field, but also in the cultural and literary field. In the case of Ottoman intellectuals after the Tanzimat, the "divide" also emerges as a result of a "search". Those who code themselves completely to the West, those who adhere to their own culture and constants despite the West, and those who remain in a "dilemma" between East and West as a third way, constitute three different pillars of the intellectual tragedy in the modernization adventure. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, one of the Turkish intellectuals after the Tanzimat, is the portrait of an intellectual in the "void". The fact that he could not establish a sense and feeling connection with the sources of his own civilization, took him to the West on Valery's fringe. Despite the West, his teacher Yahya Kemal's moves towards his own resources and reviving his civilization remain inconclusive in many respects in the context of Tanpınar. Although Turkish poetry is one of the founding elements of our civilization for Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's transformation of this element into meaninglessness and its imitation of Western civilization's esthetic concern will be among the important issues to be discussed in this article.