Özet:

This article studies the evolution of Melih Cevdet Anday’s poetic style with a particular emphasis on his use of imagery. Traditional accounts of Anday’s poetry have tended to call attention to the beginning of his poetic career as part of the Garip (Birinci Yeni) movement and eventual alignment with the aesthetic sensibility of the İkinci Yeni. Recently, critics have complicated this picture by demonstrating continuities in Anday’s early and late poetic styles, as well as calling into question the categorization of Anday with the İkinci Yeni. This article builds on this recent criticism by demonstrating continuities and changes in Anday’s descriptive practices across the different stages of his poetic career. A thorough examination of Anday’s imagery requires assessment of the careful distance he maintained from the other imageoriented practices in the modern era. To that end, Anday’s linguistic and philosophical approach to imagery are analyzed, as well as the tenor of the relationship Anday establishes between language and objective reality. Finally, the centrality of Wallace Stevens’s influence on Anday’s poetic style needs to be emphasized, since both poets challenge dominant image-oriented trends in modern poetry. Thus, Stevens’s influence on Anday proves instructive for an analysis of the poet’s changing style within the modernist context. The article builds on existing scholarly comparisons of the two poets by analyzing Anday’s 1965 translations of Stevens. Finally, it offers a detailed analysis of the formal, linguistic, and descriptive aspects of Anday’s poem “İstasyon" to demonstrate the nature of the poet’s philosophical negotiations between language and reality.

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