Summer – Composer Richard Strauss sets three short poems by Hermann Hesse to music; they become part of his valedictory Four Last Songs, his final works before his death in 1949.
Sometime this year, Jack Kerouac introduces the phrase Beat Generation to describe his friends and as a general term describing the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at this time to the novelist John Clellon Holmes
Di Goldene Keyt, an Israeli literary quarterly, is founded
W. H. Auden, "In Praise of Limestone", a poem published in Horizon in July (written in May), later published in a collection in 1951 (native English poet living in the United States)
Robinson Jeffers, The Double Axe and Other Poems,[10] largely critical of U.S. policy, the book came with an extremely unconventional note from Random House that the views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publisher; several influential literary critics disapproved of the book, with particularly scathing pieces penned by Yvor Winters and Kenneth Rexroth, who had previously commented favorably on Jeffers' work
Mahjoor, Vava Subahuki, a political poem on the indignation of Kashmiris at delays in the United Nations Security Council concerning pleas to counter Pakistan's actions regarding that area; Kashmiri[19]
Alexander Mezhirov, Kommunisty, vpered!, "Communists, Ahead!" poem reprinted in his second collection, New Encounters, and in many volumes, anthologies and samplers; Russia, Soviet Union[22]
August 31 – Andrei Zhdanov, 52 (born 1896), Soviet government official and persecutor of poets, writers and artists; until the late 1950s, Zhdanovism, defined cultural production in the Soviet Union; reducing permissible culture to a straightforward, scientific chart, where a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value; Zhdanov and his associates further sought to eliminate foreign influence from Soviet art, proclaiming that "incorrect art" was an ideological diversion[26]
^Amrita Paresh Patel, "24. Selected Poems of Dilip Kumar Roy: A Study", p 267, in Indian English Poetry: Critical Perspectives, edited by Jaydipsinh Dodiya, 2000, Delhi: Prabhat Kumar Sharma for Sarup & Sons, ISBN81-7625-111-9, retrieved via Google Books on July 17, 2010; and Vinayak Krishna Gokak, [ The Golden Treasury Of Indo-Anglian Poetry (1828–1965), p 319, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi (1970, first edition; 2006 reprint), ISBN81-260-1196-3, retrieved August 6, 2010
^ abcdefghijklmnLudwig, 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)
^ abcdefgAuster, 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
^Rees, William, The Penguin book of French poetry: 1820–1950, p 810, Penguin, 1992, ISBN978-0-14-042385-3
^"Danish Poetry" article, p 272, in Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan, et al., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993. New York: MJF Books/Fine Communications
^Shrayer, Maxim, "Aleksandr Mezhirov", p 879, An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, publisher: M.E. Sharpe, 2007, ISBN0-7656-0521-X, ISBN978-0-7656-0521-4, retrieved via Google Books on May 27, 2009
^"Danish Poetry" article, p 273, in Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan, et al., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993. New York: MJF Books/Fine Communications
^Paniker, Ayyappa, "Modern Malayalam Literature" chapter in George, K. M., editor, ' 'Modern Indian Literature, an Anthology' ', pp 231–255, published by Sahitya Akademi, 1992, retrieved January 10, 2009
^Stites, Richard. Soviet Popular Culture. Cambridge University Press: 1992. 117.
