Mythological elements in the poems of Melih Cevdet Anday

Mythology, which has become one of the major themes of Turkish poetry since the 1930s, is also one of the main themes that feed the poetry universe of Melih Cevdet Anday. Anday, who did not give much place to mythological elements in his poems, written with a clear, effortlessly conveying poetry savvy, which he started with Odd and continued with a socialist notion, appears to have added mythology with Odysseus Bound (1962), where a great break took place in his understanding of poetry, as one of his its main ingredients of his newly established poetic universe. Benefiting from Greek mythology in Odysseus Bound, where he started to make use of mythology intensively, Anday expanded his range with On the Nomad Sea (1970) and starts to benefit from Anatolian and Mesopotamian mythologies. With said book, mythology becomes one of the main components of Anday poetry. Adding Indian and Egyptian mythologies to his wide range of mythology in his book The Death of the Boat (1975), it is seen that Anday makes use of mythology in all his poetry books after Odysseus Bound, including his last poetry book, Under the Rain (1995). In this study, all of Anday's published poems were scanned and it was tried to determine which mythological elements he used in his poems. The findings were grouped and tried to be explained. Finally, how Anday received the mythological narratives and how he tried to bring modern interpretations to them in the poems that he composed based on mythological narratives have been examined.