Spring – August Derleth launches the poetry magazine Hawk and Whippoorwill in the United States.
September 5 – Welsh poet Waldo Williams is imprisoned for six weeks for non-payment of income tax (a protest against defence spending).
An inscription of an excerpt of the Poema de Fernán González is discovered on a roofing tile in Merindad de Sotoscueva, the earliest known record of it.
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:
Margaret Avison, Winter Sun
Daryl Hine, The Devil's Picture Book
Kenneth McRobbie, Eyes Without a Face
Eli Mandel, Fuseli Poems
Peter Miller, Sonata for Frog and Man
Edmund Snow Carpenter, American anthropologist, editor, Anerca, anonymous Eskimo poems, with drawings by Enooesweetok
A. J. M. Smith, editor, The Oxford book of Canadian verse, in English and French, including untranslated poems in French combined in chronological order with English-language poems
Nissim Ezekiel, The Unfinished Man: Poems Written in 1959, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Dom Moraes, John Nobody, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
Deb Kumar Das, The Night before Us, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Pradip Sen, And Then the Sun, first edition (revised edition, 1968), Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Raul De Loyola Furtado, The Oleanders and Other Poems, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Keshav Malik, The Rippled Shadow
Barjor Paymaster, the Last Farewell and Other Poems, Bombay: Asia Publishing House
V. Madhusudan Reddy, Sapphires of Solitude, Hyderabad: V. Man Mohan Reddy
Sasthi Brata, Eleven Poems, Calcutta: published by the author
W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio
Sir John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
Edwin Bronk, A Family Affair, Northwood, Middlesex: Scorpion Press
Austin Clarke, The Hore-Eaters (see also Ancient Lights 1955, Too Great a Vine 1957)
Patric Dickinson, The World I See
Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems
D. J. Enright, Some Men Are Brothers
Ted Hughes, Lupercal, London: Faber and Faber; New York: Harper
John Knight, Straight Lines and Unicorns
Peter Levi, The Gravel Ponds
Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling
Norman MacCaig, A Common Grace
Dom Moraes, Poems, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (posthumous)
Sylvia Plath, The Coolossus, and Other Poems
William Plomer, Collected Poems
Peter Redgrove, The Collector, and Other Poems, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
James Reeves, Collected Poems 1929–59
Charles Tomlinson, Seeing is Believing
Andrew Young, Collected Poems
John Ashbery, The Poems
W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio
Paul Blackburn, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit: A Bouquet for Flatbush
Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters
Witter Bynner, New Poems
Gregory Corso, The Happy Birthday of Death
Louis Coxe, The Middle Passage
E. E. Cummings, Collected Poems
James Dickey, Into the Stone
Robert Duncan:
The Opening of the Field
Selected Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Books
Richard Eberhart, Collected Poems 1930–1960
Paul Engle, Poems in Praise, including the sonnet sequence "For the Iowa Dead"
Jean Garrigue, A Water Walk by Villa d'Este
Ramon Guthrie, Graffiti
Anthony Hecht, A Bestiary
Daryl Hine, The Devil's Picture Book
Daniel G. Hoffman, A Little Geste and Other Poems
Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, New York: Atheneum
LeRoi Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, New York: Totem/Corinth Books
Donald Justice, The Summer Anniversaries
Weldon Kees, The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees posthumous, edited by Donald Justice
Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues
Galway Kinnell, What a Kingdom It Was, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
Robert Lowell, Life Studies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy
Phyllis McGinley, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades
James Merrill, Water Street, Atheneum Publishers
W. S. Merwin:
The Drunk in the Furnace, New York: Macmillan (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975)
Translator, The Satires of Persius, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press
Joesphine Miles, Poems 1930–1960
Howard Moss, A Winter Come, a Summer Gone: Poems 1946-1960, New York: Scribner's
Howard Nemerov, New and Selected Poems, University of Chicago Press
John Frederick Nims, Knowledge of the Evening
Charles Olson:
The Distances, New York: Grove Press
The Maximus Poems, New York: Jargon/Corinth Books
Kenneth Patchen, Because It Is
Ezra Pound, Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares, multi-lingual cantos
Carl Sandburg, Wind Song
Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Wilfred Townley Scott, Scrimshaw
W. D. Snodgrass, Heart's Needle
Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts
William Stafford, West of Your City
Eleanor Ross Taylor, Wilderness of Ladies
Theodore Weiss, Outlanders, New York: Macmillan
Reed Whittemore, The Self-Made Man and Other Poems
Yvor Winters, Collected Poems, Chicago: The Swallow Press
Criticism, scholarship and biography
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (college textbook), originally published in 1938, goes into its third edition (a fourth will be published in 1976)
Ed Dorn, What I See in the Maximum Poems, Migrant Press (criticism)
Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance, an attack on the dominant critical values of modern poetry in the vein of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound
The New American Poetry 1945-1960, a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960, aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999.
Poets represented:
Helen Adam – John Ashbery – Paul Blackburn – Robin Blaser – Ebbe Borregaard – Bruce Boyd – Ray Bremser – Brother Antoninus – James Broughton – Paul Carroll – Gregory Corso – Robert Creeley – Edward Dorn – Kirby Doyle – Robert Duerden – Robert Duncan – Larry Eigner – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Edward Field – Allen Ginsberg – Madeline Gleason – Barbara Guest – LeRoi Jones – Jack Kerouac – Kenneth Koch – Philip Lamantia – Denise Levertov – Ron Loewinsohn – Edward Marshall – Michael McClure – David Meltzer – Frank O'Hara – Charles Olson – Joel Oppenheimer – Peter Orlovsky – Stuart Perkoff – James Schuyler – Gary Snyder – Gilbert Sorrentino – Jack Spicer – Lew Welch – Philip Whalen – John Wieners – Jonathan Williams
Allen Curnow, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, New Zealand
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:
Anne Hébert, Poèmes
Michèle Lalonde:
Songe de la fiancée détruite
Geôles
Paul Morin, Géronte et son mirior
Jean-Guy Pilon, La mouette et le large, Montréal: l'Hexagone
Yves Préfontaine, L'Antre du poème
Pierre Trottier, Les Belles au bois dormant
Gilles Vigneault, Etraves
Criticism, scholarship and biography
Gérard Bessette, Les Images en poésie canadienne-française
Louis Aragon, Les Poetes
Aimé Césaire, Ferrements, Martinique author published in France; Paris: Editions du Seuil
Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, Evidences
Michel Deguy, Fragments du cadastre
Mohammed Dib, Ombre gardienne, with a preface by Louis Aragon
Jean Follain, Des Heures
Paul Géraldy, Vous et moi
Pierre Jean Jouve, Proses
Pierre Oster, Un nom toujours nouveau
Saint-John Perse, Chronique
Jacques Prévert, Histoires
Tchicaya U Tam'si, À triche-coeur
Manuel Blanco-González, La luna et lluvia
Dolores Castro, Cantares de vela
Pablo Antonio Cuadra, El jaguar y la luna (Nicaragua), winner of the Rubén Darío Prize
Manuel Durán, La paloma azul
Germán Pardo García, Centauro al sol
León de Greiff, Obras completas, with a preliminary study by Jorge Zalamea (Colombia)
Carlos García-Prada, editor, Escala del sueño, anthology of 35 Castilian lyrical poets
Elías Nandino, Nocturna palabra (Mexico)
Criticism, scholarship and biography
Emilio Armaza, Eguren, an anthology and analysis of the Peruvian poet's verse
Antonio Oliver Belmás, Este otro Rubén Darío
Gastón Figueira, De la vida y la obra de Gabriela Mistral
Manuel Pedro González, editor, Antología crítica de José Marti, including writing by Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Unamuno, and Onís
Glen L. Kolb, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, "A Study of the Life, Times and Poetry of a Spanish Colonial Satirist"
Eduardo Neale-Silva, Horizonte humano, the first detailed biographical study of the Colombian poet José Eustasio Rivera
Federico de Onís, Luis Palês Matos—vida y obra-bibliografía, antología, poesías, inéditas, a study of the Puerto Rican poet's life and artistic development
Odysseus Elytis, Έξη και μια τύψεις για τον ουρανό ("Six Plus One Remorses For The Sky"), Greece
H. M. Enzensberger, editor, Museum der modernen Poesie, anthology of international modernist poetry, German
Haim Gouri, Shoshanat Ruhot ("Compass Rose"), Israeli writing in Hebrew
Jess Ørnsbo, Digte ("Poems"), Denmark
Klaus Rifbjerg, Konfrontation, Denmark
Kedarnath Singh, Abhi Bilkul Abhi, Allahabad: Natya Sahitya Prakashan; India, Hindi
Awards and honors
Nobel Prize in Literature: St. John Perse (France)
Eric Gregory Award: Christopher Levenson
Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: John Betjeman
National Book Award for Poetry: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: W. D. Snodgrass: Heart's Needle
Bollingen Prize: Delmore Schwartz
Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets: Jesse Stuart
First State Poetry Price (Greece): Odysseus Elytis
Prix Dante (France): Pierre Jean Jouve
Canada: Governor General's Award, poetry or drama: Winter Sun, Margaret Avison
Canada: Governor General's Award, Poésie et théâtre: Poèmes, Anne Hébert
January 28 – Robert von Dassanowsky, American academic, writer, poet, film and cultural historian and producer
February 12 – George Elliott Clarke, Canadian poet and playwright
April 1 – Frieda Hughes, English-born poet, children's writer and painter
August 31 – Makarand Paranjape, Indian poet
October 30 – Kathleen Flenniken, American writer, poet, editor and educator
Jeffery Donaldson, Canadian poet, critic and theorist
Katrina Porteous, Scottish-born poet
Dipti Saravanamuttu, Sri Lankan-Australian poet, academic, journalist and script writer, moves to Australia as a child in 1972
Alexis Stamatis, Greek poet
Karenne Wood, Native American poet
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
January 14 – Ralph Chubb, 77 (born 1892), English poet, printer and artist
February 21 – Walter D'Arcy Cresswell (born 1896), New Zealand poet
February 28 – F. S. Flint (born 1885), English poet, translator and prominent member of the Imagist group
March 23 – Franklin Pierce Adams, 78 (born 1881), American writer whose "The Conning Tower" column gave critical publicity to many poets and writers, translator of poetry
May 30 – Boris Pasternak, 70 (born 1890), Russian poet and writer, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 1958, lung cancer
June 17 – Pierre Reverdy (born 1889), French poet
August 8 – Harry Kemp, 76 (born 1883), American poet
August 19 – Frances Cornford (born 1886), English poet
August 25 – David Diop (born 1927), French West African poet, air crash
October 28 – Margarita Abella Caprile (born 1901), Argentine poet
October 31 – H. L. Davis, 66 (born 1894), American fiction writer and poet
November 9 – Yoshii Isamu 吉井勇 (born 1886), Japanese, Taishō and Showa period tanka poet and playwright
