Reading Groups: Nazim Hikmet's Poems of Nazim Hikmet

This is the introduction and discussion thread for the reading group on Nazim Hikmet’s Poems (Persea, 2002).

If you’re interested in joining a Guided Poetry Reading Group from January-April, please do so here.

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A Brief Introduction

I chose Nazim Hikmet’s Poems because he is a major Turkish poet. Hikmet (1902-1963) was a political prisoner for 17 years, and then banned for 30 years after that. Besides poetry he also wrote plays, novels, screenplays, and a memoir. 

Hikmet is best described as a “romantic communist” or “romantic revolutionary.” He was born in 1902 in Selânik (Salonica). He participated in the Turkish War for Independence, which ended in 1923, against parts of the Ottoman Empire that were under Greek, French, and British rule. Vladimir Mayakovsky was an early influence, but Hikmet was not a Futurist. Instead, he became more romantic and direct in his approach. Around 1922 he stopped working in formal meter and moved to free verse, but still maintained his political convictions and leftist ideology. 

However, these convictions were adversarial and revolutionary and the autocratic government in Turkey imprisoned him and his poems were banned from 1938-1965. The poems he produced in prison led him to become a cause celebre among intellectuals internationally. In 1949, a committee that included Picasso, Robeson, and Sartre unsuccessfully campaigned for his freedom. In 1950 he began a month-long hunger strike. He was able to escape Turkey through Romania on a ship, and then settled in the Soviet Union, though the Turkish government denied permission for his wife and infant son to join him.

Because Turks were a minority population in Bulgarian S.S.R., the Soviets released his collected poems there between 1967-72 in eight volumes. 

Guiding Questions

1. When Hikmet was in exile in Paris, he hung out with intellectuals like Neruda, Sartre, Nicolás Guillén, and others. Do you think it’s important to be surrounded by people who can support poets?

2. What do you think about Hikmet’s current status in Turkey as a major writer, whereas he suffered numerous bans during his lifetime? 

3. How does Hikmet make his political and moral convictions clear within the context of lyric poetry? 

4. What do you notice about his forms and structures?

5. The United States and Turkey have the highest incarceration rates of all the OECD countries in the world. The U.S. incarcerates 655 per 100,000 people and Turkey 287 per 100,000. Do you think Hikmet’s experience is outside of possibility here or quite possible?