The Garip Preface (1941)

Together with Melih Cevdet (1915–2002) and Oktay Rifat (1914–88), Orhan Veli (1914–50) was a founding member of the Garip Movement, a small group of poets who promoted the use of simple language in a radical break from the elevated rhetoric of the classical Ottoman poets. While poets of the earlier twentieth century such as the humanist Tevfik Fikret, the modernist Ahmed Haşim, and the lyrical Yahya Kemal laid the foundations of modern Turkish poetry, they still did not break completely from all aspects of the Ottoman tradition. It wasn’t until the advent of the Garip Movement that this total break was achieved by repudiating the older tradition in every way.