Öz
According to existentialism, epistemologically, it makes no sense for a person to doubt the existence of the world one lives in. Thus, existentialism asserts the existence of the individual first of all and states that existence is a problem of ontology. In this context, existential philosophy defends the thesis that what is called essence is not before existence, as religions and classical philosophy suggest, but existence comes before essence. Hence, in accordance with this understanding, one first exists and then builds one’s own individual essence. Therefore, the world or existence has to be described and investigated in relation to human beings. At this point, the problem of "existential anxiety", which is the main subject of the study, comes to the fore. At this point, the problem of "existential anxiety", which is the main subject of the study, comes to the fore. This problem arises when a person begins to think about oneself and becomes interested in the nature of one’s being in the world and asks "What am I?" When a person gets into an existential anxiety with the aforementioned question, one becomes conscious of oneself as a subject in one’s life and takes the responsibility and tries to form one’s own identity with an effort to get rid of society/everyone or social identity.
The scope of the study, which aims to deal with the problem of existential anxiety through the example of İsmet Özel, who describes his life as a painful awakening process, is limited to Özel's poetry. This study, which centers on the basis of the "human-universe relationship" and "human freedom" in the field of philosophy of religion, is based on the method of documentary analysis of the data obtained from the literature review. In the research conducted, the stages of human's "existential anxiety" were determined by focusing on Özel's poetry. Accordingly, the stages in question were determined as the following four stages: First, the uneasiness of not being able to position oneself in the world with the "I" due to the socialization of the human before one was interested in one’s own nature; second, not becoming everyone with the emergence of awareness as a result of this restlessness; third, self-awareness gained through rebirth after loneliness as a result of not becoming everyone; the fourth and the last is the endless journey of existential anxiety.