There were a number of poetic trends in the poetry of Turkey in the early years of the Republic of Turkey. Authors such as Ahmed Haà Âim and Yahya Kemal Beyatlñ (1884âÂÂ1958) continued to write important formal verse whose language was, to a great extent, a continuation of the late Ottoman tradition.
By far the majority of the poetry of the time, however, was in the tradition of the folk-inspired "syllabist" movement (Beà  Hececiler), which had emerged from the National Literature movement and which tended to express patriotic themes couched in the syllabic meter associated with Turkish folk poetry.
The first radical step away from this trend was taken by Nazñm Hikmet Ran, whoâÂÂduring his time as a student in the Soviet Union from 1921 to 1924 was exposed to the modernist poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, which inspired him to start writing verse in a less formal style. At this time, he wrote the poem "Açlarñn Gözbebekleri" ("Pupils of the Hungry"), which introduced free verse into the Turkish language for, essentially, the first time.
Much of Nazñm Hikmet's poetry subsequent to this breakthrough would continue to be written in free verse, though his work exerted little influence for some time due largely to censorship of his work owing to his Communist political stance, which also led to his spending several years in prison. Over time, in such books as Simavne Kadñsñ OÃÂlu à Âeyh Bedreddin Destanñ ("The Epic of Shaykh Bedreddin, Son of Judge Simavne", 1936) and Memleketimden ðnsan Manzaralarñ ("Human Landscapes from My Country", 1939), he developed a voice simultaneously proclamatory and subtle.
Another revolution in Turkish poetry came about in 1941 with the publication of a small volume of verse preceded by an essay and entitled Garip ("Strange"). The authors were Orhan Veli Kanñk (1914âÂÂ1950), Melih Cevdet Anday (1915âÂÂ2002), and Oktay Rifat (1914âÂÂ1988). Explicitly opposing themselves to everything that had gone in poetry before, they sought instead to create a popular art, "to explore the people's tastes, to determine them, and to make them reign supreme over art". To this end, and inspired in part by contemporary French poets like Jacques Prévert, they employed not only a variant of the free verse introduced by Nâzñm Hikmet, but also highly colloquial language, and wrote primarily about mundane daily subjects and the ordinary man on the street. The reaction was immediate and polarized: most of the academic establishment and older poets vilified them, while much of the Turkish population embraced them wholeheartedly. Though the movement itself lasted only ten yearsâÂÂuntil Orhan Veli's death in 1950, after which Melih Cevdet Anday and Oktay Rifat moved on to other stylesâÂÂits effect on Turkish poetry continues to be felt today.
Just as the Garip movement was a reaction against earlier poetry, soâÂÂin the 1950s and afterwardsâÂÂwas there a reaction against the Garip movement. The poets of this movement, soon known as ðkinci Yeni ("Second New"), opposed themselves to the social aspects prevalent in the poetry of Nâzñm Hikmet and the Garip poets, and insteadâÂÂpartly inspired by the disruption of language in such Western movements as Dada and SurrealismâÂÂsought to create a more abstract poetry through the use of jarring and unexpected language, complex images, and the association of ideas. To some extent, the movement can be seen as bearing some of the characteristics of postmodern literature. The best-known poets writing in the "Second New" vein were Turgut Uyar (1927âÂÂ1985), Edip Cansever (1928âÂÂ1986), Cemal Süreya (1931âÂÂ1990), Ece Ayhan (1931âÂÂ2002), Sezai Karakoç (1933- ) and ðlhan Berk (1918âÂÂ2008).
Outside the Garip and "Second New" movements also, a number of significant poets have flourished, such as Fazñl Hüsnü DaÃÂlarca (1914âÂÂ2008), who wrote poems dealing with fundamental concepts like life, death, God, time, and the cosmos; Behçet Necatigil (1916âÂÂ1979), whose somewhat allegorical poems explore the significance of middle-class daily life; Can Yücel (1926âÂÂ1999), whoâÂÂin addition to his own highly colloquial and varied poetryâÂÂwas also a translator into Turkish of a variety of world literature.