A study on the mythological elements in Sezai Karakoç's poems

Mythology, whose basic property is narrative, has surrounded every moment of our lives. Narrative, which is one of the most important styles of conveying thought, is also used by mythology. Since the foundation of literature is based on narrative, poets also used this form from time to time. However, the narratives in Sezai Karakoç's poems contain symbols with profound meanings that can be understood through serious intuition. Sezai Karakoç is one of the most important representatives of Contemporary Turkish Poetry and Modern Turkish Thought as a poet and thinker. While studying the mythological elements in Sezai Karakoç's poetry, his prose was also used since it reflects his view on mythology, the mythology he made use of and his ideas about mythology. Sezai Karakoç has an Islamic worldview but he has made use of not only the Islamic mythology, which is very rich historically, but also Mesopotamian, Turkish, Greek and Egyptian civilizations, and Jewish and Christian mythologies. The mythological elements in Sezai Karakoç's poetry were studied in terms of plants, celestial elements, animals, heroes, places, colors, numbers, waters, natural elements and times; it was observed that he used mythological elements a lot while writing his poems. While using these mythological elements, he included the metaphysical elements of mythology in order to idealize the thought of Revival, which he generally built with metaphysical elements and the revival of the Eastern civilization against the Western civilization. During this study, all of the published poems of the poet were scanned and sufficient amount of examples reflecting his view on the mythological elements were included. Sezai Karakoç used the concepts that form the essence of mythology like creation, birth, life, struggle, death and immortality since he tried to form a world of ideology peculiar to him called Revival.