Savaşın Psikolojisini Şairin Yakarışlarında Okumak: Dua-Arbede-İstidrak
Reading the Psychology of War in the Poet's Supplications: Supplication-Struggle-Comprehension

Summary/Abstract: Social catastrophes and major historical upheavals are fields of crisis that deeply affect not only the material existence of the individual but also their world of meaning and psychological integrity. In such situations, for a believer, prayer transcends being merely a form of worship and becomes a fundamental strategy for coping and meaning-making in the face of fear, loss, helplessness, and uncertainty. War, in this context, constitutes a collective trauma zone that pushes human psychology to its extreme limits, and within the world of faith, supplication emerges as one of the most stable internal resources sought in the face of this destruction. This study approaches prayer not as an individual religious practice but as a psychological mainstay shaped in the face of historical calamities; it examines the literary representations of this act through the poetry of Mehmed Âkif Ersoy and İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu, who is referred to as the “Second Âkif.” The primary rationale for selecting these two poets—born one year apart and raised in the same climate of political dissolution, war, and occupation—is their development of a shared mentality and sensibility within similar historical conditions. The article first comparatively addresses the general poetics of Mehmed Âkif Ersoy and İbrahim Hakkı Eroğlu through the concepts of truth, nation, morality, zeal, and responsibility; subsequently, it seeks the foundations of these poetics within the historical context defined by the Balkan Wars, the First World War, and the National Struggle. For it is not possible to consider a poet independently from the period they lived in and the social upheaval produced by that era, the world of sensibility of figures like Âkif and Eroğlu, who particularly built their poetry around social issues, was directly shaped by these historical fractures. The texts containing supplications, which lie at the center of the study, are also a manifestation of these historical traumas. In these texts, prayer transcends the boundaries of an individual supplication and becomes a discursive space through which the collective helplessness caused by war, the search for hope, and a sense of social responsibility are articulated. In the final stage, the supplicatory poems of both poets are examined as a psychological course of the devastation caused by the atmosphere of war upon the human soul; these poems are depicted as an emotional map where different states such as anger, recourse, complaint, hope, and surrender—inflicted by traumatic experience—emerge. The study, for the first time, addresses the poetic affinity between Âkif and Eroğlu within an independent and holistic framework; it evaluates this affinity on three levels: general poetics, historical context, and the language of supplication. In this regard, it both adds a new depth to the limited number of studies on Eroğlu and offers a new perspective on the function of supplication discourse in wartime literature.

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