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 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 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]
June — Ern Malley hoax: 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 with cover illustration by Sidney Nolan. 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.[6]
Two small Canadian literary magazines, Preview and First Statement (each founded separately in 1942) combine to form Northern Review (which lasts until 1956).[10]
Saint-John Perse, Exil, suivi de Poème à l'étrangère; Pluies; Neiges Paris: Gallimard (a republication of Quatre poèmes, 1941-1944, Buenos Aires: Les Editions Lettres Françaises 1944), France[33]
Including all of the British colonies that later became India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Listed alphabetically by first name, regardless of surname:
Laxmi Prasad Devkota, Sakuntal (शाकुन्तल), the first long epic poem in the Nepali language, 24 cantos in Sanskrit Varnik meters, and the diction is very "Sanskritized"[34]
Eugenio Montale, Finisterre, a chapbook of poetry; second edition; Florence: Barbèra (first edition published in 1943 after a manuscript was smuggled into Switzerland ); Italy[36]
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[41]
December 14 — Maurice Baring, 71 (born 1874), versatile English man of letters: dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, essayist, travel writer and war correspondent
^"Book Notes" columnArchived 2008-06-07 at the Wayback Machine, 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
^Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, University of California Press, 1973, p. 470, ISBN978-0-520-02427-4. Cited in Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-37305-0, 1991, p. 274
^ ab"Selected Timeline of Anglophone Caribbean Poetry" in Williams, Emily Allen, Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, 1970–2001: An Annotated Bibliography, page xvii and following pages, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, ISBN978-0-313-31747-7, retrieved via Google Books, February 7, 2009
^Lal, P., Modern Indian Poetry in English: An Anthology & a Credo, p 314, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, second edition, 1971 (however, on page 597 an "editor's note" states contents "on the following pages are a supplement to the first edition" and is dated "1972")
^Joshi, Irene, compiler, "Poetry Anthologies"Archived 2009-08-30 at the Wayback Machine, "Poetry Anthologies" section, "University Libraries, University of Washington" website, "Last updated May 8, 1998", retrieved June 16, 2009. 2009-06-19.
^ 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
^ abcdefghiLudwig, Richard M., and Clifford A. Nault, Jr., Annals of American Literature: 1602–1983, 1986, New York: Oxford University Press ("If the title page is one year later than the copyright date, we used the latter since publishers frequently postdate books published near the end of the calendar year." — from the Preface, p vi)
^"Denis Glover" article in The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 1966 website, accessed April 21, 2008
^ abcdeAuster, Paul, editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry: with Translations by American and British Poets, New York: Random House, 1982 ISBN0-394-52197-8
^ abcBree, Germaine, Twentieth-Century French Literature, translated by Louise Guiney, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983
^Liukkonen, Petri. "Antal Szerb". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on February 17, 2011.
