Cenap Şahabettin

Cenap Şahabettin (Cenab Şahabeddin) was born in Manastır in 1870 and died in Istanbul in 1934. He trained as a physician and became one of the leading poets of the Servet-i Fünun ("Wealth of Sciences") circle of the 1890s, the group around Tevfik Fikret that brought French Parnassian and Symbolist manners into late Ottoman poetry. His verse is dense with Persian and Arabic vocabulary. The only book of poems he published, Tâmât (1886), is juvenile work in the old divan manner; the poems that made him the movement's most refined and most mocked stylist, Elhan-ı Şita among them, appeared in the periodicals of the 1890s and were never collected in his lifetime. He also wrote travel prose, essays and aphorisms.

A note on the texts: the poems below are the ones printed in periodicals between 1885 and 1925 (Saadet, Sebat, Mekteb, Servet-i Fünûn, Malûmat, Hazine-i Fünûn, Donanma and others), transcribed on tr.wikisource.org from scans of the original issues. They are in the original Turkish, in the Latin-letter transliteration of the Ottoman text that Wikisource uses, and the old spellings (ñ, â, î, û, the apostrophe for ayn) are kept as transcribed. Titles and printing dates follow the table on the author's Wikisource page; the poem's periodical and date stand in place of a book title. The Tâmât volume itself is not included, and a few short pieces (such as Elhan-ı Şita) are given in a modern transliteration.