One of the first poets in Anatolia to have composed poetry in Turkish, Yunus Emre (d. ca. 1320) had a profound impact on the development of Turkish as a literary language and the flourishing of an Anatolian mystical tradition. His work has indeed retained its ethical and aesthetic relevance to this day.

This volume brings together essays by some of the most well-known scholars of Islamic mysticism and Turkish language and literature to shed light on the poetry of Yunus from different perspectives. Andreas Tietze compares Yunus Emre with the European mystic poets of his time. Annemarie Schimmel evaluates the poet within the context of Islamic mysticism in general. İlhan Başgöz examines Yunus Emre’s life and the evolution of his ideas based on the evidence extracted from his poems. John R. Walsh explores Yunus Emre’s poems in terms of their function as hymns, while Mehmet Kaplan analyzes the metaphysical aspects of the poet’s work. Talât Sait Halman’s contribution surveys the humanistic concepts in the poems composed by this great Anatolian mystic. The book also offers a wide selection of Yunus Emre’s poems translated into English.

Talât Sait Halman (1931–2014) was a poet, scholar, and translator of Turkish literature into English and English literature into Turkish. He taught at Columbia, Princeton, NYU, and Bilkent University.