1946 in poetry.html



Events

• W. H. Auden becomes a U.S. citizen
• Ezra Pound brought back to the United States on treason charges, but found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years (to 1958).
• Upon learning about Isaiah Berlin's visit to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova this year, Stalin's associate Andrei Zhdanov, with the approval of the Soviet Central Committee, issued the "Zhdanov decree" denouncing her as a "half harlot, half nun", and had her poems banned from publication. The 1946 resolution of the Central Committee was directed against two literary magazines, Zvezda and Leningrad, which had published supposedly apolitical, "bourgeois", individualistic works of Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. In time Akhmatova's son would spend his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she would resort to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release.

Macspaunday

Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco, first published this year, made up the name "MacSpaunday" to designate a composite figure made up of these four poets:

• Louis MacNeice ("Mac")
• Stephen Spender ("sp")
• W. H. Auden ("au-n")
• Cecil Day-Lewis ("day")

Campbell, in common with much literary journalism of the period, imagined that the four were a group of like-minded poets, although they shared little but left-wing views in the broadest sense of the word.

Works published

United Kingdom

• Walter De la Mare, The Traveller
• Lawrence Durrell Cities, Plain and People
• Maurice Lindsay, editor, Modern Scottish Poetry: An Anthology of the Scottish Renaissance 1920-1945 (Faber and Faber)
• Henry Reed, A Map of Verona, including "Naming of Parts"
• Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances, including "Fern Hill" and "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"
• R. S. Thomas, The Stones of the Field

United States

• Elizabeth Bishop, * North & South, (Houghton Mifflin)
• H.D., "The Flowering of the Rod", the final part of Trilogy, a three-part poem on the experience of the blitz in wartime London
• Robert Lowell, Lord Weary's Castle, New York: Harcourt, Brace¹
• James Merrill, The Black Swan (won Glascock Prize
• Lorine Niedecker, New Goose, her first poetry collection
• William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Book I
• Reed Whittemore, Heroes & Heroines

Other

• Roy Campbell (poet), Talking Bronco, South African
• Allen Curnow, Jack Without Magic (Caxton), New Zealand²
• Odysseus Elytis, An Heroic And Funeral Chant For The Lieutenant Lost In Albania, Greek
• G. Groll, editor, De profundis, anthology of non-Nazi texts, Germany³
• Kendrick Smithyman, Seven Sonnets, Auckland: Pelorus Press, New Zealand

Criticism, scholarship and biography

• Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
• J. C. Reid, Creative Writing in New Zealand, with two chapters on poetry, scholarship, New Zealand⁴

Awards and honors

• Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later the post would be called "Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress"): Karl Shapiro appointed this year
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: No award given
• Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets: Edgar Lee Masters

Births

Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

• August 5 — Ron Silliman, American
• October 28 — Sharon Thesen, Canadian
• December 20 — Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio
• December 30 — Patti Smith, American poet and musician
• Date not known:
  • Alan Brunton (died 2002), New Zealand poet and scriptwriter⁵
  • Larry Levis (died 1996), American
  • Tom Pickard, English poet, radio broadcaster, film maker and an initiator of the British Poetry Revival movement
  • Peter Reading, English poet
  • Joachim Sartorius, German⁶
  • Maura Stanton, American
  • Marilyn Nelson Waniek, American
  • Dale Zieroth, Canada

Deaths

Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

• January 9 — Countee Cullen, 42, African American poet
• March 1 — Adriana Porter, 89, Wiccan poet
• May 25 — Ernest Rhys, 87, British poet, author, novelist, essayist best known for his role as founding editor of the Everyman's Library series of affordable classics
• July 8 — Orrick Glenday Johns, 59, American poet and playwright
• July 27 — Gertrude Stein, 73, poet and dramatist, of cancer

See also

Poetry portal

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

Notes

1. ^ M. 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
2. ^ Allen Curnow Web page at the New Zealand Book Council website, accessed April 21, 2008
3. ^ Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan, et al., editors, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993, Princeton University Press and MJF Books, "German Poetry" article, "Anthologies in German" section, pp 473-474
4. ^ Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan, et al., editors, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993, Princeton University Press and MJF Books, "New Zealand Poetry" article, "History and Criticism" section, p 837
5. ^ Robinson, Roger and Wattie, Nelson, The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, 1998, pp. 75-76, "Alan Brunton" article by Peter Simpson
6. ^ Hofmann, Michael, editor, Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

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