One of the most famous Turkish poets: Who is Yahya Kemal Beyatlı?

(1884-1958) Turkish poet. He is one of the poets who broke new ground in Turkish poetry with his innovations and understanding of poetry. He was born on December 2, 1884, in Skopje. His real name is Mehmed Agâh. His father is İbrahim Naci Bey from Niş, who was the Mayor of Skopje for a while. His mother, Nakiye Hanım, is the niece of Galip from Leskov, one of the Divan poets. Beyatlı spent his childhood on the farms of his mother and father, who had large lands in Rumelia. After completing his primary education, he entered Skopje High School in 1895. During his education at this school, he also attended the İshak Bey Mosque Madrasa and took Arabic and Persian lessons. When the Turkish-Greek (Thessaly) War started and his family had to move to Thessaloniki, he continued his education at Thessaloniki High School. Sent to Istanbul by his family in 1902, he completed his secondary education, which was hampered by the war, in Vefa High School. The poet's childhood years in the Balkan cities, when lost his mother when he was only eleven years old, left indelible traces on him throughout his life.

He went to Paris without permission from his family in 1903. After improving his French at Meaux College, which he studied in the 1903-1904 academic year, he enrolled in the Foreign Policy Department of the School of Political Sciences (L'Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques) in Paris. Well-known historians of the time such as Albert Sorel, Emile Bourgeois, and Albert Vandal were giving lectures in this school. He followed Sorel's lectures with great interest. In these lessons, he acquired the taste and culture of history, and he wanted to focus on Turkish history with the same methods. But he was as interested in literature as he was in history. According to his own statement, his departure to France was a result of his falling into the Young Turk movement, but he stayed away from political work there and attended the meetings of literary writers and artists. He met various French poets from the old and new generations. Having the opportunity to get to know French literature closely played a major role in getting rid of the influence of Edebiyat-ı Cedide's poetry and reaching a new understanding of poetry.

After nine years in Paris, he returned to his homeland in 1912. He expresses the experiences of those years in his poem “Old Paris”. In 1913, he was appointed to Darüşşafaka as a teacher of history and literature. He taught Islamic civilization for a while at the Medresetül-vaizin (Preachers Madrasa) opened in Yavuzselim. Later, he gave lectures on the history of civilization, Turkish and Western literature at Darülfünun (1915-1923). His lessons here had an impact on the younger generation; Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Nurullah Ataç, and Mustafa Nihat Özön are some of his students. Together with these young writers, Beyatlı later published the magazine Dargah.

The artist, who taught during the War of Independence, participated in the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1922 as a consultant after the war ended, and as a delegate to the negotiations with the French in 1925 for the determination of the Turkey-Syria border. He was appointed to the ambassadorship of Warsaw in 1926 and Madrid in 1929, he also served as the ambassador to Lisbon in Madrid (1931). He was in the parliament at various times (1935-1943) as a deputy of Urfa in 1923, Yozgat in 1934, and then Tekirdağ. He could not win the election in 1943, he was brought to the CHP art consultant. Although he was elected as Istanbul deputy in the 1946 by-elections, he could not win the general elections held three months later. He won the İnönü Art Award in 1948 and was appointed as the Pakistani Ambassador to Karashi in the same year. He retired in 1949. The last years of his life were spent at the Park Hotel in Istanbul, he died on November 1, 1958. After his death, with the initiative of his friends and fans, the "Yahya Kemal Lovers Society" was established, and a "Yahya Kemal Institute and Museum" was opened.

He published his first important poems in 1918, in Yeni Mecmua, under the title "Found Pages". Yahya Kemal is one of the most masterful poets of Turkish poetry, who made a remarkable breakthrough in the 20th century. The judgment that he is a groundbreaking poet in contemporary Turkish poetry is a point on which many critics agree.

He is the poet who took the first important step in the renewal of the language of poetry and the entry of living Turkish into poetry. He evaluated the development of Turkish poetry, both in content and form, from the perspective of a Western poet and with a contemporary taste, and integrated the most positive elements of this development in a new composition. The most distinctive aspect of his innovation is that he tried to change Turkish poetry in its own development. For this reason, his poetry was adopted without hesitation and reached a very wide readership.

His ability to write a poem different from the previous ones, as well as his good evaluation of the past of Turkish poetry, had a role in following Western poetry closely. He was individually influenced by and learned a lot from French poets of his kind, but none of them left a lasting, lasting impression on the artist's poetry. He says that the poet he read most in his youth was Jean Moreas and that he learned the measure and integrity from him.

It is accepted that the artist, who took a really big step in poetry with the products he gave, was the first Turkish poet who could become a Westerner without imitating the West. He can be considered a "neo-classical" artist in terms of his understanding of history in his poetry, whether he considers Divan literature a classic of Turkish poetry and interprets it with a new eye, and his admiration for the culture of the past. But from the point of view of sensibility, it would be fair to consider him a romantic.