Self-portrait of an Artist: İlhan Berk as a Poet, Interpreter and Artist in His Private Letters

Art composes the content of private letters written to Memet Fuat and Enis Batur, who are the poet and artist İlhan Berk’s editors. When the letters are analyzed, we notice that those represent Berk’s life and his perspective on art and world. So these works are important for the history of literature. Berk considers that the world to be a subject of writing and he has a desire to live all his life by writing. For Berk, writing means expressing himself. Although the themes of love, woman, history and sexuality dominate his poems, he never deepens in a subject or a style. So, for him, every poem or book is a new beginning. Berk thinks that empiricism is one of his most important characteristics and his poems are always in a change. The permanent side of his poems are language and meaning. For the poet, language is the most important problem in modern poems and he disagrees with wasting the poetic language. The ambiguity of meaning in his poems is sometimes confused with meaningless but he thinks that a poetry has to have a lot of meanings. Thus it can be permanent. İlhan Berk, who searches for permanency and good poetry, is an artist that is aware of poetry traditions of Turkish Literature and benefits from these traditions. He is also one of the rare poets that has an opportunity of reading and acknowleding western poems in original and bring together these cultural richness with his own poems. This artist, who wants to be known as a poet first, reflects it to his prose, drawings and all his life, and in a sense he breathes poetry . İlhan Berk who is in love with writing, became one of the most productive artist of Turkish literature. In this study, through the highlighted letters which were written to Memet Fuat and Enis Batur, İlhan Berk is portrayed as a poet, interpreter and artist totally.