1960 in poetry.html



Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

Events

• August Derleth launches the poetry magazine, Hawk and Whippoorwill.
• Welsh poet Waldo Williams is imprisoned for six weeks for non-payment of income tax (a protest against defence spending).
• An inscription of an excerpt of the Poema de Fernán González is discovered on a roofing tile in Merindad de Sotoscueva, the earliest known record of it.

Works published in English

Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:

Canada

• Margaret Avison, Winter Sun¹
• Kenneth McRobbie, Eyes Without a Face¹
• Peter Miller, Sonata for Frog and Man¹

Anthologies

• A. J. M. Smith, the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, including untranslated poems in French combined in chronological order with English-language poems¹
• Edmund Snow Carpenter, an anthropologist, editor of this volume, Anerca, anonymous Eskimo poems, with drawings by Enooesweetok¹

United Kingdom

• W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio¹
• Sir John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
• Edwin Bronk, A Family Affair, Northwood, Middlesex: Scorpion Press²
• Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems¹
• D. J. Enright, Some Men Are Brothers¹
• Ted Hughes, Lupercal, London: Faber and Faber; New York: Harper¹²
• John Knight, Straight Lines and Unicorns¹
• Peter Levi, The Gravel Ponds¹
• Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling¹
• Norman MacCaig, A Common Grace¹
• Dom Moraes, Poems, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
• Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (posthumous)¹
• William Ploner, Collected Poems¹
• Peter Redgrove, The Collector, London: routledge and Kegan Paul¹²
• Charles Tomlinson, Seeing is Believing¹
• Andrew Young, Collected Poems¹

United States

• Paul Blackburn, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit: A Bouquet for Flatbush
• Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters
• E. E. Cummings, Collected Poems
• Robert Duncan, Selected Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Books¹²
• Paul Engle, Poems in Praise, including the sonnet sequence "For the Iowa Dead"
• Jean Garrigue, A Water Walk by Villa d'Este¹
• Ramon Guthrie, Graffiti¹
• Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, New York: Atheneum²
• LeRoi Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, New York: Totem/Corinth Books²
• Weldon Kees, The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees posthumous, edited by Donald Justice
• Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues¹
• Galway Kinnell, What a Kingdom It Was, Boston: Houghton Mifflin²
• Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads¹
• Robert Lowell, Life Studies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy²
• Howard Moss, A Winter Come, a Summer Gone: Poems 1946-1960, New York: Scribner's²
• Howard Nemerov, New and Selected Poems, University of Chicago Press²
• Charles Olson:
  • The Distances, New York: Grove Press²
  • The Maximus Poems, New York: Jargon/Corinth Books²
• Ezra Pound, Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares, multi-lingual cantos¹
• Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Boston: Houghton Mifflin²
• Wilfred Townley Scott, Scrimshaw¹
• W. D. Snodgrass, Heart's Needle¹
• Theodore Weiss, Outlanders, New York: Macmillan²
• Reed Whittemore, The Self-Made Man and Other Poems¹

Criticism, scholarship and biography

• Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (college textbook), originally published in 1938, goes into its third edition (a fourth will be published in 1976)
• Ed Dorn, What I See in the Maximum Poems, Migrant Press (criticism)³
• Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance, an attack on the dominant critical values of modern poetry in the vein of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound

The New American Poetry 1945-1960

The New American Poetry 1945-1960, a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960, aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999.

Poets represented:

Helen Adam – John Ashbery – Paul Blackburn – Robin Blaser – Ebbe Borregaard – Bruce Boyd – Ray Bremser – Brother Antoninus – James Broughton – Paul Carroll – Gregory Corso – Robert Creeley – Edward Dorn – Kirby Doyle – Robert Duerden – Robert Duncan – Larry Eigner – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Edward Field – Allen Ginsberg – Madeline Gleason – Barbara Guest – LeRoi Jones – Jack Kerouac – Kenneth Koch – Philip Lamantia – Denise Levertov – Ron Loewinsohn – Edward Marshall – Michael McClure – David Meltzer – Frank O'Hara – Charles Olson – Joel Oppenheimer – Peter Orlovsky – Stuart Perkoff – James Schuyler – Gary Snyder – Gilbert Sorrentino – Jack Spicer – Lew Welch – Philip Whalen – John Wieners – Jonathan Williams

Other in English

• Dom Moraes, John Nobody, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
• Allen Curnow, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, New Zealand⁴

Works in other languages

Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:

French language

Canada

• Anne Hébert, Poèmes¹
• Michèle Lalonde:
  • Songe de la fiancée détruite¹
  • Geôles¹
• Paul Morin, Géronte et son mirior¹
• Yves Préfontaine, L'Antre du poème¹
• Pierre Trottier, Les Belles au bois dormant¹
• Gilles Vigneault, Etraves¹

Criticism, scholarship and biography

• Gérard Bessette, Les Images en poésie canadienne-française¹

France

• Louis Aragon, Les Poètes¹
• Georges Emmanuel Clancier, Evidences¹
• Paul Géraldy, Vous et moi¹
• Pierre Jean Jouve, Proses¹
• St. John Perse, Chronique¹

Spanish language

Latin America

• Manuel Blanco-González, La luna et lluvia¹
• Dolores Castro, Cantares de vela¹
• Pablo Antonio Cuadra, El jaguar y la luna (Nicaragua), winner of the Rubén Darío Prize¹
• Manuel Durán, La paloma azul¹
• Germán Pardo García, Centauro al sol¹
• León de Greiff, Obras completas, with a preliminary study by Jorge Zalamea (Colombia)¹
• Carlos García-Prada, editor, Escala del sueño, anthology of 35 Castilian lyrical poets¹
• Elías Nandino, Nocturna palabra (Mexico)¹

Criticism, scholarship and biography

• Emilio Armaza, Eguren, an anthology and analysis of the Peruvian poet's verse¹
• Antonio Oliver Belmás, Este otro Rubén Darío¹
• Gastón Figueira, De la vida y la obra de Gabriela Mistral¹
• Manuel Pedro González, editor, Antología crítica de José Marti, including writing by Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Unamuno, and Onís¹
• Glen L. Kolb, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, "A Study of the Life, Times and Poetry of a Spanish Colonial Satirist"¹
• Eduardo Neale-Silva, Horizonte humano, the first detailed biographical study of the Colombian poet José Eustasio Rivera¹
• Federico de Onís, Luis Palês Matos—vida y obra-bibliografía, antología, poesías, inéditas, a study of the Puerto Rican poet's life and artistic development¹

Other

• Odysseus Elytis, Έξη και μια τύψεις για τον ουρανό ("Six Plus One Remorses For The Sky"), Greece
• H. M. Enzensberger, editor, Museum der modernen Poesie, anthology of international modernist poetry, German⁵
• Haim Gouri, Shoshanat Ruhot ("Compass Rose"), Israeli writing in Hebrew

Awards and honors

• Nobel Prize in Literature: St. John Perse (France)

United Kingdom

• Eric Gregory Award: Christopher Levenson
• Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: John Betjeman

United States

• National Book Award for Poetry: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: W. D. Snodgrass: Heart's Needle
• Bollingen Prize: Delmore Schwartz
• Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets: Jesse Stuart

Greece

• First State Poetry Price: Odysseus Elytis

Births

• January 28 - Robert von Dassanowsky, American academic, writer, poet, film and cultural historian, and producer.
• February 12 - George Elliott Clarke, Canadian poet and playwright
• Date not known:
  • Jeffery Donaldson, Canadian poet, critic, and theorist
  • Dipti Saravanamuttu, Sri Lankan-Australian poet, academic, journalist and script writer who moved to Australia as a child in 1972
  • Alexis Stamatis, Greek

Deaths

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

Boris Pasternak (sometime before 1954)

• January 14 - Ralph Chubb, 77, English poet, printer, and artist
• February 28 - F. S. Flint (born 1885), English poet, translator and prominent member of the Imagist group
• March 23 - Franklin Pierce Adams, 78 (born 1881), American writer whose "The Conning Tower" column gave critical publicity to many poets and writers; also a translator of poetry
• May 30 - Boris Pasternak, 70 (born 1890), Russian poet and writer, winner of a Nobel Prize in Literature, of lung cancer
• August 8 - Harry Kemp, 76
• Date not known:
  • Frances Cornford, English poet
  • Walter D'Arcy Creswell (born 1896), New Zealand
  • David Diop
  • Frank S. Flint

Notes

See also

Poetry portal

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