İki Milli Şair: Mehmet Âkif Ersoy-Mirza Muhammed Taki Melikü'ş-şuara Bahar

Modernization activities following “Imperial Edict of Gulhane”, corresponds to the Kacarlar Period in Iran. In this transition period, Turkish and Iranian intellectuals who were in a dilemma choosing between Western and Eastern cultures, were confronted with many new ideas and movement. There were many conflicts among intellectuals, goverment and the public since it was difficult to adopt to the rapidly changing political enviroment around the world and country during that time. It enables us to achieve significant knowledge by researching political, social and literary developments which gained a certain ground within the constitutional movement, through the contemporary poets and authors. In this context, I will try to enlighten the period by focusing on political and literary lives of the key individuals Mehmet Âkif Ersoy who witnessed the second Constitutionalist Period in Turkey and Mirza Muhammed Taki Melikul’s-Suara Bahar who had similar experience in the first Constitutionalist Period in Iran. There are a number of parallels between political and literary lives of Mirza Muhammed Taki Melikül’sSuara Bahar who lived in the years 18861951 and Mehmet Âkif Ersoy who lived in the years 1873-1936 and their poems. Political, social and economic circumstances of the two countries which were in the First World War, led their poets and intellectuals to fight for freedom. Under the foreign invasions and political pressures in their countries, those two poets also aimed to raise their people’s awareness in the values of their own history, culture and civilization. In this study, two national poets which became prominent figures in their literature histories will be analysed comperatively over the characteristics of the period, and also evaluated according to positivist methodology which argues that literary works are closely linked with writer’s life and products of their lives.