Yunus Emre
Yunus Emre, also known as Derviş Yûnus, was a Turkish folk poet and Sufi who greatly influenced Turkish culture. The UNESCO General Conference unanimously passed a resolution declaring 1991, the 750th anniversary of the poet's birth, International Yunus Emre Year.
Biography
Yunus Emre has exercised immense influence on Turkish literature, because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmed Yesevi and Sultan Walad, one of the first known poets to have composed works in the spoken Old Anatolian Turkish. His diction remains very close to the popular speech of the people in Central and Western Anatolia. This is also the language of a number of anonymous folk-poets, folk-songs, fairy tales, riddles, and proverbs.Like the Oghuz Book of Dede Korkut, an older and anonymous Central Asian epic that inspired Yunus Emre in his occasional use of Hayran as a poetic device had been handed down orally to him and his contemporaries. This strictly oral tradition continued for a long while. Following the Mongolian invasion of Anatolia, facilitated by the Sultanate of Rûm's defeat at the 1243 Battle of Köse Dağ, Islamic mystic literature thrived in Anatolia; Yunus Emre became one of its most distinguished poets. He remains a popular figure in a number of countries, stretching from Azerbaijan to the Balkans, with seven different and widely dispersed localities disputing the privilege of having his tomb within their boundaries.
His poems, written in the tradition of Anatolian folk poetry, mainly concern divine love as well as human destiny:
and a poem about Muhammad, Ali [ibn Abu Talib|Ali], Hasan and Husayn: