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Yunus Emre (1238?–1320?) was a Turkish poet and Sufi mystic. He has exercised an immense influence on Turkish literature, from his own day until the present. Because Yunus Emre is, after Ahmet Yesevi and Sultan Veled, one of the first known Turkish poets to have composed their works in the spoken Turkish of their age and region rather than in Persian or Arabic, his diction remains very close to the popular speech of his contemporaries in Central and Western Anatolia, which was also the language of a number of anonymous folk-poets, of folk-songs, fairy tales, riddles (tekerlemeler) and proverbs which have also come down to our times. Alike the Oghuz Turkic Book of Dede Korkut, an older and anonymous Central Asian epic, the Turkish folklore that inspired Yunus Emre in his occasional use of tekerlemeler as a poetic device had been handed down orally to him and his contemporaries and indeed continued for a long while not to be transcribed in writing. ^[1]

Following the Mongol invasion of Anatolia facilitated by the Seljuk Turkish defeat at the 1243 Battle of Köse Dağ, Islamic mystic literature thrived in Anatolia, and Yunus Emre became one of its most distinguished poets. He is one of the first poets known by name to have composed extensively in the Turkish language, and his poems—despite being fairly simple on the surface—evidence his skill in describing quite abstruse mystical concepts in a clear way. He remains a popular figure in a number of countries, stretching from Azerbaijan to the Balkans, with seven different and widely dispersed localities disputing the privilege of having his tomb within their boundaries.

His poems, written in the tradition of Anatolian folk poetry, mainly concern divine love and human destiny:

Yunus'dürür benim adım

Gün geçtikçe artar odum

İki cihanda maksûdum

Bana seni gerek seni^[2]

"Yūnus Emre is my name; my fire increases day by day. In the two worlds, my goal is this: it is You I need, You."^[3]

• Yunus Emre & Humanism