In the 1950s, Turkey's literary world was shocked by a radical new poetic movement: İkinci Yeni, or the "Second New." Associated with the poets Ece Ayhan, Edip Cansever, Cemal Süreya, and Turgut Uyar among others, the Second New produced formally complex poetry that flouted conventional rules of grammar, syntax, and even spelling. Many literary critics in Turkey were actively hostile to this new brand of poetic modernism. Attempting to make sense of it, influential literati like Asım Bezirci called the Second New a new divan poetry, referring to the courtly poetry of the Ottoman Empire that was heavily based on the prosody and symbolısm developed in classical Arabic and Persian poetry. This presentation analyzes Second New poetry and the literary debates it elicited in relation to the complex legacy and afterlives of Ottoman literature. The political reform movements of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic were strongly invested in literary questions. Pro-reform writers and intellectuals rejected what they saw as the obscure, elitist, and decadent five-hundred-year tradition of imperial poetry and instead promoted a folk-based and ethnically demarcated form of nationalist poetry. This literary commitment to clarity, realism, and populism began to break down with the appearance of the Second New in the 1950s. Seeking to slander this new modernist current, intellectuals labeled it divan, which had become a pejorative term in nationalist literary discourse. While the experimental poetry produced by Second New poets had very little to do with the quantitative verse forms, mystical symbolism, rose- and nightingale-filled imagery of Ottoman courtly poetry, this paper will explore moments where they did explicitly engage with taboo elements of the imperial legacy. Ece Ayhan’s gnomic prose poems of the 1950s and 1960s focused on the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, and bohemian neighborhoods of Istanbul. His work not only explored social, religious, and sexual ‘Others’ of the city’s underworld, it dug into the Ottoman and even Byzantine past. Similarly, Turgut Uyar’s 1970 book Divan actively played with poetic forms associated with Ottoman poetry, such as the ghazal, while using them to explore themes related to modern life, technology, consumption, and the city. While critics who described the Second New as a revival of divan poetry were seeking mainly to discredit them, this essay’s exploration of their poetry shows that the Second New ways indeed grappling with the afterlives of the imperial past in ways that sought to trouble nationalist orthodoxies.