1945 in poetry

Ezra Pound mug shot

• March 4 — Pablo Neruda elected a Communist party senator in Chile. He officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
• April — Ilona Karmel and Henia Karmel, sisters from the Kraków Ghetto and together Polish Jewish prisoners of the Nazis, are on a forced death march when Germans in tanks crush them and then shove them, still living, into a mass grave. Soon after, a group of prisoners passes them, including a cousin of theirs. From their hiding place in her clothes, Henia Karmel rips out some poems she and her sister had written and hands them to her cousin to give to her husband, Leon, back in Kraków. The cousin delivers the poems, and the sisters are saved by a nearby farmer who takes them to a hospital. Henia writes 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 writes in her poem, "Snapshots": "My name is Number 906. / And guess what? I still write verse."[1]
• April 2 — British aircraft carrier HMS Glory (built in Belfast) is commissioned and sails for the Pacific theatre of war; Cornish poet Charles Causley is serving as a Chief Petty Officer Coder on this voyage.
• May — Estonian poet Heiti Talvik is deported to Siberia and never heard from again.[2]
• May 2 — Ezra Pound is arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest".[3] On May 5, he turns himself in to U.S. forces. He is 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 drafts 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 wins the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948.[4]
• May 8 — Victory in Europe Day: Edmund Blunden writes the poem "V Day" to mark the occasion; it will not be published until the 75th anniversary.[5]
• 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 published work and then sent them as the purported work of a recently deceased poet. The hoax is played on Max Harris, at this time 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 comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays. An Australian newspaper uncovers the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart loved early Modernist poets but despise later modernism and especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and are jealous of Harris's precocious success.
• June 7 — Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, based on George Crabbe's The Borough, is first performed.[6]
• August 6 — Atomic bombing of Hiroshima: Japanese poet Sadako Kurihara writes "Bringing Forth New Life" (生ましめんかな, Umashimen-kana) in the ruins.[7]
• August 16 — Japanese Admiral Takijirō Ōnishi commits seppuku having left a death poem.[8]
• Two small Canadian literary magazines, Preview and First Statement (each founded separately in 1942) combine to form Northern Review (which lasts until 1956).[9]
• Kyk-over-al magazine founded in Guyana.[10]
• Vladimir Nabokov becomes a naturalized citizen of the United States.

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

• 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
• Governor General's Award, poetry or drama: Now is Time, Earle Birney (Canada)[38]

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

• February 2 – Yoshihiko Funazaki 舟崎 克彦, Japanese novelist, poet, illustrator, manga writer, songwriter and academic (surname: Funazaki)
• February 10 – Clive Wilmer, English poet and academic
• February 23 – Robert Gray, Australian
• March 7 – Ira Sadoff, American poet and academic
• April 2 – Anne Waldman, American
• April 10 – Norman Dubie, American
• April 13 – Lucha Corpi, Mexican-born poet and mystery writer
• April 18 – Dick Davis, English-born poet and translator[39]
• April 30 – Annie Dillard, American poet, 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner
• May 12 – Bernadette Mayer, American
• June 7 – Falguni Ray (died 1981), Bengali poet and youngest member of Hungryalism movement
• June 21
  • Nirmalendu Goon, Bengali poet
  • Adam Zagajewski, Polish poet, novelist and essayist
• July 7 – Natsuki Ikezawa (池澤夏樹), Japanese novelist, essayist, translator and poet, stops publishing poetry in 1982
• July 12 – Remy Sylado (Yapi Panda Abdiel Tambayong), Indonesian writer
• July 21 – Wendy Cope, English
• August 12 – J. D. McClatchy (died 2018), gay American poet, literary critic and editor of the Yale Review
• August 13 – Tom Wayman, Canadian poet and academic
• August 28 – Marianne Bluger (died 2005), Canadian
• August 29 – Galit Hasan-Rokem, born Galit Hasan, Finnish-born Israeli Hebrew folklorist and poet
• August 31 – Van Morrison, OBE, Irish poet, singer-songwriter, author and musician
• September 21 – Kay Ryan, American
• November 8 – Alice Notley, American
• December 14
  • Stanley Crouch (died 2020), American poet and music and cultural critic
  • Carolyn Rodgers (died 2010), American
• Also:
  • Magaly Alabau, Cuban
  • W. S. Di Piero, American
  • Carol Muske-Dukes, American
  • Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish-born poet and academic
  • Leon Stokesbury, American

Grave of Franz Werfel

Grave of Charles Williams

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

• January 15 — Ursula Bethell, 70 (born 1874), New Zealand
• January 22 — Else Lasker-Schüler, 75 (born 1869), German-born Jewish poet
• c. January 27 — Antal Szerb, 43 (born 1901), Hungarian writer, killed in Wolfs (Balf) concentration camp; buried with pages of his bilingual anthology Száz vers ("100 poems", 1943/1944) in his pockets[40]
• February 1 – Teresa Bogusławska, 16 (born 1929), Polish poet and resistance worker, of meningitis
• February 16 – Yun Dong-ju, 27 (born 1917), Korean poet, died in a Japanese prison (surname: Yoon; also spelled "Yoon Dong-joo" and "Yun Tong-ju")
• March 16 — Börries von Münchhausen, 70 (born 1874), German poet and Nazi activist, suicide
• March 20 — Lord Alfred Douglas, 74 (born 1870), English poet, former lover of Oscar Wilde
• May 15 — Charles Williams, 58 (born 1886), English poet, novelist, theologian, critic and publisher, member of The Inklings
• June 8 — Robert Desnos, 44 (born 1900), French surrealist poet and journalist, arrested by the Gestapo as a member of the French Resistance and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944; dies soon after liberation of Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia where he was held, of typhoid
• July 20 — Paul Valéry, 73 (born 1871), French philosopher, author and Symbolist poet
• August 26 — Franz Werfel, 54 (born 1890), Austrian-Bohemian German-language novelist, playwright and poet
• September 9 — Zinaida Gippius, 75 (born 1869), Russian poet, novelist and playwright
• December 14 — Maurice Baring, 71 (born 1874), versatile English man of letters: dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, essayist, travel writer and war correspondent
• Undated — Swami Ananda Acharya (born 1881), Indian poet who wrote Indian poetry in English[41]

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