The politics of sexuality in Turgut Uyar’s poetry

Abstract

1959, the year Turgut Uyar’s Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı was published, is considered a modernist turning point in his poetry. The poet began to be seen as one of the “Second New” poets with this book, while he had been mainly writing Garip influenced or patriotic poems in the books Arz-ı Hal published in 1949, and Türkiyem published in 1952. This thesis will investigate how Turgut Uyar’s changing the relationship between the poetic subject and sexuality becomes one of the indicators of the modernization of his poetry. The most important claim of this thesis is that with Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı, Turgut Uyar’s changing the relationship with sexuality by attributing various functions to it through the poetic subject becomes one of the critical indicators of this modernist shift. This shift has been understood in the literature primarily based on the argument that the poet’s and poetry’s place moved to the big city. Although this approach is correct, considering that we can count several poems in the poet’s first books in the Second New, it falls short of explaining this shift. The poetic subject does not generally enter the sexual sphere in the first two books. However, with Dünyanın En Güzel Arabistanı he has attributed functions to sexuality that will enable him to escape from the order, become a subject and embody, and change the fiction of masculinity, and rearrange himself and his relationship with the outside in the field presented by sexuality. This thesis argues that this re-arrangement has an essential role in Uyar’s poetry to become one of the “Second New” poets.