From Mundane to Memorable: The Poetics of Everyman in the Poetry of W.H. Auden and Orhan Veli Kanık

Year 2025, Volume: 35 Issue: 1, 277 - 294, 19.06.2025

Meltem Can

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2024-1594217

Abstract

Twentieth-century poetry, shaped by the turmoil of the two World Wars, military conflicts, poverty, and oppressive regimes, often gives voice to those ignored by history. W. H. Auden in Anglo-American literature and Orhan Veli Kanık in Turkish verse emerge as pioneering figures of this chaotic era and offer a democratic poetics foregrounding the lives of ordinary people. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” and Veli’s “Epitaph” (Kitabe-i Sengi Mezar) portray the unremarkable lives and de-individualization of common men that eventually sink into oblivion upon death. Similarly, Auden’s “Sonnet XVI” and Orhan Veli’s “Bayrak” (The Flag) capture the despair and futility of war, defy its glorification, and reflect on how ordinary people are sent to their deaths by those in power. In that regard, this study argues that these poems exalt human life over socio-political ideologies and realistically portray the disparaged lives of the common people—whether lost within the masses or consumed by the horrors of war. By reclaiming the dignity of the individual reduced to a mere statistic or dispensable entity, Auden and Kanık, in these works, seek to re-humanize him and call for a deeper recognition of the value of the individual amidst the all-pervading forces of politics and war and, present a democratized, collectivist, and humanistic poetry that designates ordinary lives as extraordinary. Thus, these poems redefine poetry as a medium that celebrates the dignity and value of the common man’s life over great historical figures and ideologies.

Keywords

The Unknown Citizen , Sonnet XVI , Kitabe-i Sengi Mezar , Bayrak , Common Man

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