THE SPACES IN AHMET KUTSI TECER'S POETRY

Abstract

In literary works, space expresses the environment in which events take place and are staged and the environment where people live and interact. Space, which is one of the basic elements of novels and narratives, is also studied in poetry. The element of space in the poem is important in terms of reflecting the geography where the poet is, he has a relationship with and is inspired by it. It is also an element that indicating the poet's personality, the point of view, aesthetic experience, cultural level, and the world of meaning and imagination. The concrete and the abstract value of the poem, its symbolic level and the world of signs can be better understood from the space. In poetry, space helps the reader to understand the spirit of the poet and to recognize his personal world.
Ahmet Kutsi Tecer (1921-1967), one of the original poets of Turkish poetry of the Republican era, is one of the names who include space in his poems. Due to his teaching profession, the poet, who was in various regions of Anatolia, reflected this geography in his poems. In the context of the open-closed, natural-artificial spaces in Tecer’s poems, the outer world that encompasses the environment and the selfness that people live in occupies an important place. In this paper, we discuss Ahmet Kutsi Tecer’s poetry collection in the context of space. We discuss within a framework that includes the self-life story of the poet, the environment in which he was born and grew up, the cities in which he worked, and then we argue the forms of presentation of the spaces in his poems under sub-headings. By giving examples from poems, we try to interpret the perception of space of the poet. Based on the traces left by the element of space in the world of the poet's emotion, we discuss the contribution of space to his artistic personality and poetry aesthetics. We examine Tecer’s description, presentation, and conceptions of space in the context of human, space, and poetry. Tecer, who mentions different cities and regions of Turkey in his poems, especially Edirne, wrote his space-based poems with a realistic and observing perspective. Poet’s life, his world of emotion and thought were also influential in the processing of the space. Tecer meets his readers in a wide space ranging from natural venues to arranged places, from closed spaces to metaphysical spaces. He creates his poems in a wide range of space from town to villages, from houses to rooms, from roads to streets, from mountains to plains, from countryside to seas.