PASSION FOR POLITICS

"In the polite world of Western letters, poems are meant to speak for themselves. The poet is only as interesting as his work: if he wishes to be taken seriously, his private and political passions must never eclipse his words. But that is just what Nazim Hikmet did, with a vengeance and without apology, throughout his stormy life. His poetry was his politics. He sought not just to give voice to the downtrodden and the disenfranchised but to spur them on to revolution..."

Maureen Freely reviews a new English edition of Nazim Hikmet's poetry in Cornucopia 28