This paper explores the contentious debates on aesthetics and politics that took place during the turbulent years of the Turkish 1960s. At the same time that Turkey was experiencing unprecedented politicization, massive student strikes, and workers’ revolts, groups of intellectuals and poets on the Left were engaged in a series of internecine polemics over the shape of Turkish poetry. On one side was İkinci Yeni, or the ‘Second New.’ Typically associated with the poets Edip Cansever, Turgut Uyar, Cemal Süreya, İlhan Berk, and Ece Ayhan, İkinci Yeni revolutionized Turkish literature in the 1950s with its ludic, erotic, and formally complex poetry. On the other side of this battle stood young, Left-wing poets such as Ataol Behramoğlu, Sennur Sezer, Metin Demirtaş, Süreyya Berfe, and Hasan Hüseyin. Associated with various socialist organizations and Leftist magazines of the period, these poets espoused a more realistic, unequivocally engagée, poetic idiom. In a series of written campaigns, these militant poets critiqued the “obscure, formalist understanding of art” that marked İkinci Yeni poetry. They accused their counterparts of turning their backs on the language and values of the people, of being incomprehensible, and of serving as tools of US imperialism. In terms reminiscent of György Lukács’ rejoinders to Theodor Adorno during the Expressionism Debate of the 1930s, Turkish Leftist poets declared war on what they saw as reactionary, elitist, and formalist literature. My paper unpacks the stakes of these debates both in the context of the Turkish 1960s and in the longue durée of Turkish nationalist interventions in culture. In advocating for poetic realism and direct political engagement, the ‘60s socialist poets were laying claim to a poetic lineage beginning with the communist poet Nâzım Hikmet in the 1920s and continuing through the socialist-realist poetry of the 1940s. Despite facing severe state repression for their political views, these Leftist poets internalized the state’s aesthetic mandates on clarity, accessibility, and direct representation. İkinci Yeni, on the other hand, represented a veritable return of the repressed: with its unclear/illegible language, its cosmopolitan posture, its attention to erotic and unconscious experience, and its obsession with religious/linguistic/sexual minorities, it represented everything that Turkish nationalist—including many Turkish Leftists—opposed. After analyzing the divergent visions of Leftist politics represented by these two poetic currents, I gesture toward the widespread use of İkinci Yeni poetry during the Gezi Park protests of 2013 as a metric of recent transformations on the Turkish Left.