The tradition names seven great poets and treats their work as the core of the repertory. The list is usually given as Nesimi, Fuzuli, Shah Khatai, Pir Sultan Abdal, Kul Himmet, Yemini and Virani, and it spans the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Shah Khatai is the pen name of Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, which places a reigning shah inside the devotional canon of a community that lived under his Ottoman rivals, and that placement is itself a piece of the tradition's history.
Two things complicate the canon. The first is that it was transmitted orally and by manuscript in village settings for centuries, so texts circulate in variants and attributions move between poets. Poems ascribed to Pir Sultan Abdal in particular are considerably more numerous than one man could plausibly have written, and the name has functioned partly as a signature that later poets could take up.
The second is that the naming of a definite canon of seven is comparatively recent. Alevism was described, categorised and to a significant extent codified from the late Ottoman period onward, under pressure from a state that wanted to know what it was dealing with and from Alevi intellectuals who wanted to state it. The repertory is genuinely old. The tidy list of seven, and the printed collections that fixed particular texts as standard, belong to that later process, and a reader should keep the two apart.