Abstract:

The history of the 19th century Turkish literature is also a history of modernization. This modernization movement also shows itself within the language and literary movement. In this period, when the Western norms are presented as a prescription of liberation against the traditional by the pioneering names of the renewal, old-new comparisons and conflicts occur in many areas. Particularly the old-new discussions in the context of poetry divide the literaries of the time in a polarization degree. The “new” of Western literature; the Divan literature, the classical poem perception and the world of thought that forms this poem, and the norms that form the Eastern culture are defined as “old” in these discussions, the boundaries are quite moderate. It is sufficient to mention it with praise from the Divan poem once and once to be perceived as "new" opposition. In these discussions there are also two friend poets, Muallim Naci and Sheikh Vasfî Efendi, named as the defenders of the "old" names. The work, which consists of the two poets' mutual letters, is a very important source in terms of the view of the literary debates of the period by Muallim Naci and Sheikh Vasfî. The work consists of 12 letters that show that the two poets know the tradition very well and that they are very open to development and innovation. In this study, in the light of such letters, the old-new discussions of Muallim Naci and Sheikh Vasfi have been studied in literature and poetry. The study found that the two poets did not break their bonds from the tradition they raised in, but they were not closed to innovation and modernity, and they looked at the literary work with a perception of beauty far from the Eastern-West context.

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