Mystic poet. There is no definite information on the
life of Yunus Emre. The origin of our knowledge about him is the tales of
religious and mystic great personalities. It is accepted that he lived in 14th
century because of the fact that he wrote his mesnevi* in 1307 / 1308.
According to latest researches, he was born in 1240 / 1241, lived for
eighty-two years and died in 1320 / 1321.
With the help of his tales and poetry, we learn that
Yunus Emre took a well madrasah education before he entered into mysticism. He
learned that his guide was Taptuk Emre and walked for finding him. He served
his master for a long time, learnt the necessities of the way of mysticism and
completed his education when he found him near Sakarya. Afterwards, he again left
his land to guide people with his poetry. He traveled a wide region including
It is not wrong to say that Yunus Emre, who deeply influenced thousands of man of thought and art and whose poetry is read by people as well as intellectuals, is the greatest poet of Turkish Literature Yunus Emre constituted the clearest and purest resources of our poetry with his clear and pure poetry. He came through centuries by feeding his poetry originated from Islamic mysticism that advice the love of God and human, friendship, unity, mercy and working together, with a powerful lyricism. He used prosodic meter in some of his poetry but he mostly wrote with syllabic meter. There are three hundred and sixty hymns and nefes in his Divan. The basic unit of his poetry is couplet. Its form is hymn. He likes long hymns. He writes in prosody meter and uses “hezec” and “recez” bahrs that suits into Turkish syllabic meter. He constitutes his lines with repeating (4+4) caesura of syllabic meter. He uses “remel” bahr rarely. He converts Persian phrases that enter in Turkish, into Turkish phrases and creates Turkish phrases using Persian. He has a perfect rhyme structure. Actually, he is lyric and mystic.
