April — Ilona Karmel and Henia Karmel, sisters from the Kraków Ghetto and together Polish Jewish prisoners of the Nazis, were on a forced death march when Germans in tanks crushed them and then shoved them, still living, into a mass grave. Soon after, a group of prisoners passed them, including a cousin of theirs. From their hiding place in her clothes, Henia Karmel ripped out some poems she and her sister had written and handed them to her cousin to give to her husband, Leon, back in Krakow. The cousin did deliver the poems, and the sisters were also saved by a nearby farmer who took them to a hospital. Henia wrote in 1947, "these poems are real, not just scribblings.[they] came about when I was still creating myself, experiencing the pain of separation. How I could have survived, you might ask? If so, sir, you know nothing of life. It lasted, that’s all." Henia wrote in her poem, "Snapshots": "My name is Number 906. / And guess what? I still write verse."[1]
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.
December 14 — Maurice Baring, versatile English man of letters: a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, essayist, travel writer, and war correspondent
^"Book Notes" column, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2008, accessed April 17, 2008, a capsule review by Lilah Hegnauerof A Wall of Two: Poems of Resistance and Suffering from Kraków to Buchenwald and Beyond, by Henia Karmel and Ilona Karmel, adapted by Fanny Howe, University of California Press, 2007
^ abM. 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
