1941 in poetry
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Events

Robert Frost in 1941, the year he wins the Frost Medal

• September 3 — 19-year-old John Gillespie Magee, Jr., American poet and aviator, flew a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V and afterwards wrote "High Flight" about the experience, on December 11 he dies while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he had joined before the United States had officially entered World War II
• The Antioch Review founded
• Basil Bunting joins the RAF and is eventually sent to Iran as an intelligence officer and a translator during World War II.
• December — In siege-bound Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, the second wife of Danil Kharms, trudge across the city to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building and collect a trunk full of manuscripts. They hide the manuscripts through the 1940s and 1950s, even bringing them to Siberia, then covertly show them to others in the 1960s. Their actions save much of Kharms' work for posterity as well as that of fellow poet Alexander Vvedensky (of whom only about a quarter of his output survives)^[1]
• Under the Nazi occupation beginning in June 1941, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was among the Polish Jews interned in the Vilna Ghetto. He would escape and join the resistance in 1943. During the Nazi era, Sutzkever wrote over 80 poems, whose manuscripts he managed to save for postwar publication.
• Ezra Pound applies to return to the United States but is refused. He begins appearing on Rome Radio, making statements against the Allies.^[2]

Works published

• W. H. Auden, New Year Letters (or The Double Man)
• Allen Curnow, Island Time (Caxton), New Zealand^[3]
• T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, published in New English Weekly
• G. S. Fraser, The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems
• Federico García Lorca, Diván del Tamarit (Spanish for "The Diván of Tamarit", written in 1936, published posthumously this year
• R. A. K. Mason, The Dark Will Lighten, New Zealand^[4]
• Carl Rakosi, Selected Poems
• John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism, criticism
• Charles Reznikoff, Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down, self-published
• The White Horseman poetry anthology in Britain, featuring poets in the New Apocalyptics movement
• William Carlos Williams, The Broken Span
• Louis Zukofsky, 55 Poems

Awards and honors

United States

• Frost Medal: Robert Frost
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Leonard Bacon: Sunderland Capture

Births

• February 19 — Stephen Dobyns, American poet and novelist
• March 1 — Robert Hass, American poet
• March 22 — Billy Collins, American poet who served two terms as the 44th Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-2003)
• May 17 — Lyn Hejinian, American poet essayist, translator and publisher often associated with the Language poets
• May 22 — Simon J. Ortiz
• August 4 — Robert Grenier, American poet essayist, and editor often associated with the Language poets
• September 1 — Gwendolyn MacEwen (died 1987), a Canadian novelist and poet
• October 2 — John Sinclair, American poet jailed in 1969 after selling two joints to undercover narcotics officers. In 1971 his case received international attention when John Lennon performed at a benefit concert on his behalf.
• October 13 — John Snow, cricketer and poet
• November 23 — Derek Mahon Irish poet
• November 29 — Lloyd Schwartz
• date not known:
  • Toi Derricotte
  • Rachel Blau DuPlessis
  • Dave Margoshes
  • Gibbons Ruark
  • David Rosenfield
  • Stephen Yenser

Deaths

• January 6 — F. R. Higgins, poet
• January 13 — James Joyce, Irish poet and writer
• January 23 - John Oxenham, novelist and poet
• February 5 — A.B. (`Banjo') Paterson, Australian bush poet, journalist and author
• June 15 - Evelyn Underhill, poet

Alexander Vvedensky

• August 7 — Rabindranath Tagore, 80, a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj (syncretic Hindu monotheist) philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1913 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
• August 30 — Jiri Orten
• November 18 — Émile Nelligan, poet
• date not known:
  • Aline Kilmer
  • Alexander Vvedensky, Russian poet with formidable influence on "unofficial" and avant-garde art during and after the times of the Soviet Union; arrested under suspicion of planning treason and shipped off to a labor camp, he died of dysentery on the way (for the fate of his poetry, see Events section above)

Notes

1. ^ [1] Epstien, Thomas, "Vvedensky in Love", article in The New Arcadia Review "published by the Boston College Honors Program", Volume II, 2004, accessed December 8, 2006
2. ^ Ackroyd, Peter, Ezra Pound, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1980, "Chronology" chapter, p 118
3. ^ Allen Curnow Web page at the New Zealand Book Council website, accessed April 21, 2008
4. ^ Allen Curnow Web page at the New Zealand Book Council website, accessed April 21, 2008

See also

Poetry portal

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

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