istoryworld
Poetry timeline
US poet Theodore Roethke publishes The Lost Son, his second collection
Ezra Pound publishes Pisan Cantos, about his postwar imprisonment in an American detention centre near Pisa
US novelist and poet Jack Kerouac coins a term for his contemporaries, the Beat Generation
Annie Allen, by US author Gwendolyn Brooks, describes in narrative verse the life of a black girl in contemporary USA
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda publishes his epic account of South America and its people, Canto general
US author James Baldwin publishes his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, set in Harlem
English poet Philip Larkin finds his distinctive voice in his collection The Less Deceived
English poet Ted Hughes marries US poet Sylvia Plath
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is prosecuted and acquitted for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl
The Hawk in the Rain is English author Ted Hughes' first volume of poems
English author Stevie Smith publishes her collection of poems Not Waving but Drowning
The Colossus is US author Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is the first of many collections of poems by US poet Charles Bukowski
English poet John Betjeman publishes his long autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells
US novelist John Barth publishes The Sot-Weed Factor, a picaresque life of Edmund Cook set on a family tobacco plantation in Maryland
In Babi Yar the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko tackles the subject of Russian anti-Semitism
James Baldwin's third novel Another Country explores the conflicts in the life of a young unemployed black musician
John Ashbery's radical collection The Tennis Court Oath includes poems composed of sliced up fragments
Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, setting poems by Wilfred Owen, is first performed in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral
Sexual intercourse begins in this year, according to Philip Larkin's 1974 poem Annus Mirabilis
US poet John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs introduce Henry, his alter ego
Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead takes its title from the last poem, about modern disregard for a Civil War monument
New Zealand poet Fleur Adcock publishes her first collection, The Eye of the Hurricane
US author Randall Jarrell's poem The Lost World provides the title for his last published book
Irish poet Seamus Heaney wins critical acclaim for Death of a Naturalist, his first volume containing more than a few poems
