This paper explores İkinci Yeni, or the Second New, a Turkish poetic current that emerged in the mid-1950s and is typically associated with the poets Edip Cansever, Turgut Uyar, Cemal Süreya, İlhan Berk, Ece Ayhan, and Sezai Karakoç. The playful, experimental, and often obscure poetry of the Second New (SN) has alternately been described as “neo-surrealist,” “modernist,” and “avant-garde.” However, it is essential to distinguish between these movements. Each had a different relationship to politics, mass culture, high art, and literary/artistic institutions. I argue that the SN is best understood as modernist, as evidenced by its temporal self-understanding. According to Orhan Koçak, the SN must be seen within a tradition of modern Turkish poetry that since the nineteenth century has witnessed “successive outbursts of the New, with the ‘Second’ New as the last and the most drastic one in a long line of such breakthroughs.” The participation of the SN in the logic of innovation, the historical break, and the injunction to “make it new” reveals the close connection between modernism and the project of modernity. Further, following Gregory Jusdanis’ notion of “belated modernity,” I argue for the SN as an example of belated modernism. Scholarship on Euro-American modernism has focused mainly on texts within a standard periodization of roughly 1890-1945. Outside of hegemonic contexts modernism continues into the 1950s/1960s. As Frederic Jameson asserts, even after modernism become canonized in Europe and North America “the older forms of high modernism may still retain something of the subversive power they have lost elsewhere.” The condition of possibility for modernism was incomplete modernization and “the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history.” Certainly this situation continued to characterize Turkey into the 1960s, with increasing yet incomplete industrialization, the coexistence of rural squalor and modern cities, subterraneously surviving Ottoman cultural traditions and a thriving cultural industry—all of which was symbolized by the shantytowns ringing Turkey’s major metropolises. SN poetry reflects and engages these ambiguities and contradictions. Additionally, I locate the SN within a context of 1960s decolonization, Third Worldism, and global protests by workers and students. As Perry Anderson has argued, modernism was made possible by “the imaginative proximity of social revolution,” a condition that had its “after-glow” in 1968 in places like Turkey. The language of SN poetry, I argue, is that of a subject on the brink of imminent self-invention and a society facing the possibility of revolution.