Abstract
Fuad Köprülü's Criticism on Tevfik Fikret
Using the term “persona” as a critical tool, this article argues that some of Fuad Köprülü’s comments on Tevfik Fikret’s poetry might be unjustified. According to Fuad Köprülü, various ideas maintained by Tevfik Fikret in his poems give rise to apparent contradictions, and furthermore, his state of mind in these poems is not stable. For example, he sounds pessimistic in some of his poems, while in others he does not, and we cannot find any logical explanation to this situation in the poems themselves. Köprülü assumed that the voice in all of Fikret’s verse was his own; that is to say, in such poems, Fikret expresses only his very own views and emotions. From the point of view of the concept of “persona”, however, poems are poetic spaces where controversial ideas or the variable emotional states of mind may exist together without any logical explanation. Since personas are kind of poetic personalities that are temporally assigned to poems or verses by the poet, it might be an error to search for the poet in them.<
Keywords
Tevfik Fikret, Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, criticism
