An Address to the Old Inveterate Foe: A Comparative Reading of Anne Finch's Ardelia to Melancholy and Sabahattin Ali's Melancholy

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

The present study explores Anne Kingsmill Finch’s “Ardelia to Melancholy” and Sabahattin Ali’s “Melancholy” in terms of prolonged melancholia that afflicts the creative psyche of the authors. The study aims to analyse melancholic moods of the speakers represented through self-narratives, which serve as a curative method and means of expression. Based on the critical terminologies offered by Robert Burton and Julia Kristeva, the study argues that the two melancholic poems by Finch and Ali are comparable in terms of melancholic experience and that the melancholic states of the authors renovate into a milder form of melancholia, eventually indicating an aesthetic transformation through discursive poiesis. The study shows that the personas directly or indirectly try to overcome the state of objectless and causeless despondency by producing poetic discourse, and both melancholic cases are theoretically subject to an aesthetic transformation, but melancholia is observed to linger on the present cases. The paper concludes that the authors attempt to cure melancholia through poetic expression, and the very poems signpost a temporal possibility of repaired connection with language. Yet, the speakers are seen caught up in the disease in the last lines indicating retreat rather than treatment.