One important change to Turkish literature was enacted in 1928, when Mustafa Kemal initiated the creation and dissemination of a modified version of the Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic-based Ottoman script.
All of the salient aspects of Turkish life, politics and culture have found their direct or indirect expression in poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as in critical and scholarly writing.
In 1923, when the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed, the influential social thinker Ziya Gökalp wrote: "We belong to Turkish nation, the Islamic community, and Western civilization... Our literature must go the people and, at the same time, towards the West."
The 19th century men of letters inherited the classical and the folk traditions but turned their attention to the literary tastes and movements of the West- particularly of France and England.
Mehmet Akif Ersoy, a master of heroic diction, a major figure in early modern Turkish literature, devoted much of his verse to the dogma, and passion.
Yahya Kemal Beyatli was the much-acclaimed neoclassicist who produced, in the conventional forms and meters, meticulous lyrics of love, Ottoman grandeur, and Istanbul's natural attractions.
A thrust for modernization took place in the early 1940s when Orhan Veli Kanik, Oktay Rifat, and Melih Cevdet Anday launched their poetic realism.
The forms and values of classical poetry, too, are kept alive by a group of highly accomplished formalists who are clustered mainly around the monthly Hisar which ceased publishing at the end of 1980 after 30 years.