Abstract

Sherko Bekas is one of the poets who wrote 44 collections of poems (divans). He used 290 archaic words in 16 collections of poems and he used 112 allusions in his 22 collections of poems. Hence, the poet becomes a pioneer in using archaic words in his collections of poems. One of the reasons for using this abundance of archaic words is his mother; another is his readings of dictionaries; and also he is influenced by other poets namely Ahmed Shamloo (1925-2000). In this research, all these words that the poet used as synonyms and archaisms, and also a statistics of the mentioned words are presented according to each collection of poems. However, attention is also directed to the role of archaic words on poetry at large, and on Bekas’s poems in particular.