1945_in_poetry

Events

• Benjamin Britten\'s opera Peter Grimes, based on George Crabbe\'s The Borough
• Vladimir Nabokov becomes a naturalized citizen of the United States
• March 4 — Pablo Neruda elected a Communist party senator in Chile. He officially joined the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
• May 2, 1945, Ezra Pound was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. While in the camp he drafted the Pisan Cantos, a section of the work in progress which marks a shift in Pound\'s work, being a meditation on his own and Europe\'s ruin and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948.
• June — Australia\'s most celebrated literary hoax takes place when Angry Penguins is published with poems by the fictional Ern Malley. Poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the poems from lines of other poems and then sent them as the purported work of a recently deceased poet. The hoax was played on Max Harris, then a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had started the modernist magazine, Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle of literary friends agreed that a hitherto completely-unknown modernist poet of great merit had come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition of the magazine with the poems came out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays. An Australian newspaper uncovered the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart loved early Modernist poets but despised later modernism and especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and were jealous of Harris\'s precocious success.

Works published

• W.H. Auden, Collected Poems
• Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville
• H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), "Tribute to the Angels", second part of Trilogy (1944–46) about the experience of the Blitz in wartime London
• T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
• Elizabeth Smart, "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept" (prose poem)
• Randall Jarrell, Little Friend, Little Friend, including "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", New York: Dial PressM. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, "Selected Bibliography: Individual Volumes by Poets Discussed", pp 334-340
• Philip Larkin, The North Ship, London: Dent
• Alun Lewis, Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets, posthumously published

Awards

• Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later the post would be called "Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress"): Louise Bogan appointed this year. She would serve until sometime in 1946.

• Pulitzer Prize for poetry: Karl Shapiro, V-Letter and Other Poems

Births

• January 14 — Stephen Morse, American poet
• April 2 — Anne Waldman, American poet
• April 30 — Annie Dillard, American poet and 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner
• June 21 — Adam Zagajewski Polish poet, novelist, and essayist
• July 21 — Wendy Cope, English poet
• August 13 — Tom Wayman, Canadian poet and academic
• date not known:
  • Terry Blackhawk
  • Marianne Bluger
  • Syl Cheyney-Coker
  • W. S. Di Piero
  • Norman Dubie, American poet
  • Calvin Forbes
  • Robert Gray, poet
  • Ellen Jaffe
  • Bernadette Mayer, American poet
  • J.D. McClatchy, gay American poet, literary critic, and editor of the Yale Review.
  • Carol Muske-Dukes
  • Alice Notley, American poet

Deaths

• January 22 — Else Lasker-Schuler, 75, poet
• March 20 — Lord Alfred Douglas, poet and former lover of Oscar Wilde
• May 15 — Charles Williams, British writer and poet, and a member of the loose literary circle called the Inklings
• June 8 — Robert Desnos, was a French surrealist poet.
• July 20 — Paul Valéry, French philosopher, author and Symbolist poet
• December 14 — Maurice Baring, versatile English man of letters: a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, essayist, travel writer, and war correspondent
• date not known:
  • Mary Ursula Bethell
  • Capel Boake

See also

• Poetry
• List of poetry awards
• List of years in poetry

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