1920 in poetry.html



Events

The Dial, January 1920 issue

• Ezra Pound moves from London to Paris where he moved among a circle of artists, musicians and writers who were revolutionising modern art
• The Dial, a longstanding American literary magazine, is re-established by Scofield Thayer; the publication becomes an important outlet for Modernist poets and writers (until 1929), with contributors this year including Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Charles Demuth, Kahlil Gibran, Gaston Lachaise, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Odilon Redon, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, Van Wyck Brooks, and W. B. Yeats
• Russian poet Nikolay Gumilyov co-founds the "All-Russia Union of Writers" in the Soviet Union, where he makes no secret of his anti-Communist views, crosses himself in public, and doesn't care to hide his contempt for half-literate Bolsheviks. His fate changes in 1921.
• May — William Butler Yeats concludes a lecture tour (begun in the fall of 1919) in the United States and crosses the Atlantic to settle in Oxford.^[1]

Works published

• Hart Crane publishes his poem "My Grandmother's Love Letters" in The Dial. This is his first real step towards recognition as a poet.
• T. S. Eliot:
  • Poems, including Gerontion and Sweeney Among the Nightingales
  • The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
• Robert Frost, Miscellaneous Poems
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs From Thistles
• Wilfred Owen, Poems, posthumously published
• Ezra Pound:
  • Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, London^[2]
  • Umbra, London^[2]
• Charles Reznikoff, Poems published by the New York Poetry Book Shop; the book features poems from Reznikoff's Rhythms and Rhythms II
• Carl Sandburg, Smoke and Steel
• Siegfried Sassoon, Picture Show
• Georg Trakl, Der Herbst des Einsamen ("The Autumn of The Lonely"). The Austrian native's work was published in Germany.
• Charles Vildrac, Chants du désespéré (France)
• William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell. Improvisations
• W.B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer

Awards and honors

Births

E.E. Cummings' unusual style can be seen in his poem "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct" from the January 1920 issue of The Dial.

• January 24 — Keith Douglas, English poet
• June 18 — Rosemary Dobson, Australian poet
• August 16 — Charles Bukowski
• November 3 — Oodgeroo Noonuccal (died 1993), Australian poet, actress, writer, teacher, artist and campaigner for Aboriginal causes
• November 23 — Paul Celan (died 1970), German-language poet born to a German-speaking Jewish family in a place then part of Romania, now part of Ukraine
• Amy Clampitt
• Alex Comfort
• Keith Castellain Douglas
• Dennis Joseph Enright
• Barbara Guest
• Edwin Morgan (Scotland)
• Howard Nemerov
• Alexander Scott (Scotland)

Deaths

• May 11 — William Dean Howells, 83, American literary critic, author and poet
• June 5 — Julia A. Moore, 72, American poetaster, famed for her notoriously bad poetry
• December 21, 1920 — Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, 56, Somali poet, religious and nationalist leader who for 20 years led armed resistance to the British, Italian, and Ethiopian forces in Somalia and used his patriotic poetry to rally his supporters
• date not known:
  • Charles Carryl
  • Louise Imogen Guiney, American poet
  • Dollie Radford, English poet and writer

See also

Poetry portal

• Poetry
• List of years in poetry

Notes

1. ^ Mac Liammoir, Michael, and Eavan Boland, W. B. Yeats, Thames and Hudson (part of the "Thames and Hudson Literary Lives" series), London, 1971, "Chronology" chapter, p. 132
2. ^ ^{a b} Ackroyd, Peter, Ezra Pound, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1980, "Bibliography" chapter, p 121