A Time-Line of Poetry in English
Note that these divisions simplify the history of poetry and
are useful only for characterizing general trends. A poet in
one period may have more in common with a poet in another
than with contemporaries.
383-407
ROMAN LEGIONS LEAVE BRITAIN
449
ANGLO-SAXONS INVADE BRITAIN
537
BATTLE OF CAMLAN: ARTHUR, A ROMANO-BRITON LEADER, KILLED
596
AUGUSTINE LEAVES ROME AS MISSIONARY TO BRITAIN
658
•
Caedmon (Representative Poetry Online), an uneducated herdsman, about this date discovers that he can extemporaneously utter poetry at the newly-founded monastery at Strenæshalc (Whitby) and makes verses on creation. He is the first known poet and this the first known poem in English.
673
700-800
• Cynewulf writes and signs four Anglo-Saxon poems:
Christ II, Elene, The
Fates of the Apostles, and Juliana.
700
• About this time runic extracts from
The Dream of the Rood are carved on
the Ruthwell Cross.
735
• The Venerable
Bede's "Death Song"
871
ALFRED, KING OF ENGLAND (-899)
900-999
• Deor, a scop, writes a poem of consolation, probably
in this century
937
• The battle of Brunanburh, at which
King Athelstan defeated the Scots, is celebrated in a
poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
943
EDWY (-957)
950-1000
• Period of the making of the four great
poetry manuscripts: the Junius MS, the Vercelli Book,
the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf MS. The
Beowulf
can be dated as early as 680.
957
EDGAR (-975)
975
EDWARD THE MARTYR (-978)
978
ETHELRED (-1013)
1000
• The Battle of Maldon, a poem on the fight between the English
and the Danes in 991.
1013
SWEGN FORKBEARD (-1014)
1016
EDMUND IRONSIDE (-1016); CNUT (-1035)
1035
HAROLD HAREFOOT (-1040)
1040
HARTHACNUT (-1042)
1042
EDWARD THE CONFESSOR (-1066)
1066
HAROLD GODWINSON (-1066); DEFEATED
BY WILLIAM OF NORMANDY ON OCT. 14 (-1087)
1087
WILLIAM II (-1100)
1100-1200
• Layamon, late 12th cent. author of Brut,
a 32,000-line poem.
1100
HENRY I (-1135)
1135
STEPHEN (-1154)
1154
HENRY II (-1189)
1155
• Wace's Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut
(?)
1160-1170
• Period of Walter Map, Anglo-Latin poet
1160
• Thomas of Britain's Anglo-Norman Tristan
1172
• Wace's Anglo-Norman Roman de Rou
(?)
1189
RICHARD I (-1199)
1199
JOHN (-1216)
1216
HENRY III (-1272)
1230
• first 4,000 lines of Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose,
composed
1250
• The Owl and the Nightingale, an amusing verse
debate probably written by Nicholas of Guildford about this time
1265
Births
Dante Alighieri.
1272
EDWARD I (-1307)
1275
• Jean de Meun extends Roman de la Rose
by over 17,500 lines
before 1300
• Dame Sirith (?)
1300-1400
• Huchown.
1300
• Two romances, Guy of Warwick and
Bevis of Hampton, were composed about this time.
Births
Richard Rolle (?)
ca. 1307-1321
• Alighieri Dante's Divina Commedia.
1307
EDWARD II (-1327)
1314
ROBERT BRUCE DEFEATS EDWARD II AT BANNOCKBURN
ca. 1314-25
1321
Deaths
Dante Alighieri.
before 1325
• Cursor Mundi, a verse history of the world
in about 24,000 lines.
1327
EDWARD III (-1377)
1330
• Sir Orfeo, a romance (?)
1343
1349
Deaths
Richard Rolle
ca. 1350-52
• Boccaccio's Decameron
1350
Births
Andrew of Wyntoun (Scotland) (?)
1352
• Wynnere and Wastoure
1361
Births
Henry Scogan (?).
1362
ENGLISH REPLACES FRENCH IN PARLIAMENT AND LAW COURTS
ca. 1367-70
• A-text of Langland's Piers Plowman
1369
• Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess
1370
1376
• John Gower writes his Mirour de
l'Omme, or Speculum Meditantis,
about 1376-78.
• John Barbour (Scotland) writes The Bruce,
a verse chronicle of about 13,000 lines.
1377
RICHARD II (-1399)
1379
• John Gower's Vox Clamantis is written
about 1379-81.
1380-1400
1380
• John Wyclif translates the Bible (?),
into English.
1384
Deaths
Wyclif
1385
1386
ca. 1387-1400
1390-1393
1391
Deaths
Sir John Clanvowe, supposed author of
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale
1394
about 1395
• Pierce the Ploughmans Crede
1395
Deaths
John Barbour
1399
HENRY IV (-1413)
before 1400
• The alliterative Morte Arthure (?)
• Sir Launfal, by Thomas Chestre
1400
ca. 1406-25
1407
Deaths
Henry Scogan
1408
1412
• John Lydgate's Troy Book, written about
1412-20
1413
HENRY V (-1422)
1420
• John Lydgate's The Siege of Thebes,
written about 1420-22
1422
HENRY VI (-1461, 1470-71; Representative Poetry Online)
1424
1425
Deaths
Andrew of Wyntoun (?)
1426
• John Lydgate's The Pilgrimage of Man,
written about 1426-30
1431
• John Lydgate's The Fall of Princes, written about 1431-38
1437
1440
Births
Henry the Minstrel, otherwise known as
"Blind Harry" (Scotland).
1449
about 1450
• Sir Richard Holland's The
Buke of the Howlat.
1455
RICHARD, DUKE OF YORK, DEFEATS HENRY VI AT ST. ALBANS
ON MAY 22, THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR OF THE ROSES
1456
1460
• "Blind Harry" writes the 12,000-line poem, The
Wallace (?).
Births
John Skelton (Representative Poetry Online) (?); Walter Kennedy (Scotland) (?)
1461
EDWARD IV (-1469, 1471-83)
1471
Deaths
Henry VI (Representative Poetry Online)
1474
CAXTON PRINTS THE FIRST BOOK IN ENGLAND
Births
Gavin Douglas (Representative Poetry Online) (?); Walter Kennedy (Scotland) (?)
before 1475
• The Floure and the Leaf
composed (?)
1475
Births
Alexander Barclay (?);
Stephen Hawes (Representative Poetry Online)
(?)
1476
• William Caxton prints Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (?)
Births
Henry Parker Morley, lord
1477
Births
Thomas More
1483
EDWARD V (-1483); RICHARD III (-1485)
• William Caxton prints Gower's Confessio
Amantis
1484
• William Caxton prints Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
Early Modern English 1485-1800
1485
HENRY TUDOR DEFEATS RICHARD III ON BOSWORTH FIELD;
HENRY VII (-1509)
1486
Births
Sir David Lindsay (Scotland)
1491
1492
COLUMBUS DISCOVERS SAN SALVADOR ON OCT. 12
Deaths
"Blind Harry."
1497
JOHN CABOT DISCOVERS NEWFOUNDLAND
Births
John Heywood (?)
1498
• John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte
composed (?)
1500
Births
John Ballantyne (?)
1503
• William Dunbar's The Thrissill
and the Rois composed
• Henry, son of Henry VII, becomes the Prince of Wales
1506
1507
• William Dunbar's
The Dance of the
Sevin Deidly Synnis,
The Goldyn
Targe,
The Lament for the Makaris,
and
The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen
composed (?)
1508
• William Dunbar's poems are published in Edinburgh
Deaths
Walter Kennedy (?).
1509
• Alexander Barclay's
Ship of Fools
• Stephen Hawes'
Passetyme of Pleasure
• Henry Tudor is married to Catherine of Aragon on
June 11 and succeeds his father Henry VII on Aug.
21 as
Henry VIII
Births
Thomas Vaux, 2nd baron Vaux of Harrowden (Representative Poetry Online)
1511
1513
• Gavin Douglas translates Virgil's
Aeneid (Representative Poetry Online)
1514
•
Dr. D. Cooper (Representative Poetry Online), active at the court of Henry VIII
1517
Births
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (Representative Poetry Online) (?)
1519
Births
Nicholas Grimald (?)
1520
• Thomas Churchyard (?)
1521
1522
• John Skelton's "Why Come Ye Not to Court?" attacks Cardinal Wolsey
1523
• John Skelton's The Garlande of Laurel
written
1528
Births
Thomas Whythorne
1529
Deaths
John Skelton (Representative Poetry Online), on June 21
1530
1532
• W. Thynne edits Chaucer's works
• Ariosto's Orlando Furioso
1533
HENRY VIII SECRETLY MARRIES ANNE BOLEYN
1534
1535
Deaths
Sir Thomas More, executed
1536
1540
•
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (Representative Poetry Online), develops blank verse 1537-46 in his translation of the
Aeneid, Books 2-6
1542
1543
1545
Births
Alexander Montgomerie (Scotland) (?);
George Turberville (?)
1546
• John Heywood's verse proverbs
Births
Giles Fletcher the elder
1547
EDWARD VI (-1553)
Deaths
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (Representative Poetry Online), executed by Henry VIII;
Henry VIII (Representative Poetry Online)
1548
• John Bale's Illustrium Majoris Britanniae
Scriptorum Summarium, biographical entries on
major British writers
Deaths
John Ballantyne (?)
1549
•
R. Wever (Representative Poetry Online) devises
Lusty Juventus about 1549-53
• Sir Thomas Wyatt's
Certayne Psalmes,
an English translation of part of the Biblical psalms.
1550
1552
• Thomas Churchyard's A Mirror for
Man
Deaths
Alexander Barclay
1553
JANE (-1553); MARY I (-1558)
•
Gavin Douglas' translation of Virgil's
Aeneid,
published posthumously
•
William Stevenson (Representative Poetry Online) about this year wrote
Gammer Gurton's Needle
• Thomas Wilson's
Art of Rhetoric
1554
1555
• John Heywood's Epigrams
Deaths
Sir David Lindsay
1556
• John Heywood's The Spider and the Fly
Deaths
Henry Parker Morley, lord;
Thomas Vaux, 2nd baron Vaux of Harrowden (Representative Poetry Online)
1557
• The translation by
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey,
of books II and IV of Virgil's
Æneid
is published.
• Thomas Tusser's
Hundreth Good Pointes of
Husbandrie
•
Tottel's Miscellany
•
William Gray of Reading (Representative Poetry Online) is active about this time.
Births
Sir Arthur Gorges;
Thomas Watson (?)
1558
ELIZABETH I (-1603)
1559
• The Mirror of Magistrates, with
20 tragic tales; enlarged repeatedly until 1609
1560
1561
• Julius Caesar Scaliger's poetics published
in France
Births
Sir John Harington (?); Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke;
Robert Southwell (Representative Poetry Online) (?)
1562
Births
Henry Constable;
Samuel Daniel (Representative Poetry Online); Nicholas Grimald
1563
• Barnabe Googe's Eclogues, Epitaphs,
and Sonnets
• second edition of The Mirror of
Magistrates
1564
1565
• Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's
Metamorphoses, books I-IV,
published, completed in 1575
Births
John Davies (?).
1566
Births
John Hoskyns (Representative Poetry Online); James I of England (James VI of Scotland).
1567
1568
• John Skelton's poems published
1569
• Barnabe Barnes' sonnet sequence Parthenophil
and Parthenophe
Births
Sir John Davies;
Emilia Lanyer (Representative Poetry Online), née Bassano
1570
Births
Sir Robert Aytoun (Scotland);
Thomas Bateson (Representative Poetry Online) (?);
Thomas Dekker (Representative Poetry Online) (?); Samuel Rowlands (?)
1571
1572
• Rauf Coilyear (late 15th cent. Scot.),
published
1573
• George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres
Births
Ben Jonson (Representative Poetry Online) (?)
1574
1575
• George Gascoigne's Certayne notes of
instruction concerning the Making of verse or ryme
in English names "Poulter's Measure," iambic couplets of 12- and
14-syllable lines; also his Poesies
1576
• Richard Edwards' compilation of Paradyse
of Dainty Devises
• George Gascoigne's The Steele glas
1577
1578
• Thomas Proctor's A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions
Births
George Sandys;
John Taylor the "water poet" (?)
Deaths
John Heywood
1579
• Stephen Gosson's prose
The School of Abuse
attacks poets and players
• Edmund Spenser's
Shepheardes Calender (Representative Poetry Online)
1580
• Thomas Churchyard's translation of Ovid's Tristia,
I-III
Births
Thomas Ford (Representative Poetry Online) (?); Thomas Middleton (baptised);
John Webster (Representative Poetry Online) (?)
Deaths
John Heywood (?);
Isabella Whitney (Representative Poetry Online) (after)
1581
• Sir Philip Sidney completes the
Old Arcadia
and writes his
Defence of Poetry or
An
Apologie for Poetrie 1579-81 (published
in 1595), in response to Stephen Gosson's
School of Abuse
1582
• Stanyhurst's translation of Virgil's Aeneid,
I-IV
• Philip Sidney writes Astrophel and Stella about this
time: 108 sonnets and 11 songs about his unrequited love for Penelope Rich
• Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway
1583
• Sir Philip Sidney completes the New Arcadia
within two years
Births
Sir John Beaumont;
Orlando Gibbons (Representative Poetry Online); Aurelian Townshend (?)
1584
Deaths
Thomas Norton
1585
• James VI of Scotland writes Essays
of a Prentice in the Art of Poesie
1586
• William Warner's Albions England
• William Webbe's Discourse of English Poetry
1587
Births
Lady Mary Sidney Wroth (?).
Deaths
John Bellenden (Scotland)
1588
• William Byrd's Psalmes, Sonets, & Songs of sadnes and pietie
1589
1590
• Thomas Lodge's
Rosalynde: Euphues golden legacie
• George Peele's
Polyhymnia
• Thomas Watson's
Italian Madrigals Englished
• revised version of Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia published
posthumously
•
Edmund Spenser (Representative Poetry Online):
The Faerie Queene, Books I-III
1591
• Sir John Harrington's translation of Ariosto's
Orlando
Furioso
• Sir Philip Sidney's
Astrophel and Stella
• Edmund Spenser's
Daphnaida and
Complaints
1592
• Samuel Daniel's
"Delia (Representative Poetry Online). Contayning certayne sonnets: with the complaint of Rosamond
• Joshua Sylvester's translation of
The Divine Weeks
and Works of Du Bartas, completed in 1608
Deaths
Thomas Watson
1593
• Henry Constable's sonnet sequence
Diana
•
Michael Drayton (Representative Poetry Online):
Idea
• Thomas Morley's
Canzonets
•
The Phoenix Nest, compiled by R. S.
• Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis
• Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia republished
with the three books of the old version
1594
• George Chapman's The Shadow of Night
• Michael Drayton's Ideas Mirrour
• R. Carew's translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata
• Thomas Morley's Canzonets and
Madrigalls
• Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece
Deaths
Barnabe Googe
1595
• George Chapman's
Ovid's Banquet of Sense
• Samuel Daniel's
Civil Wars between the
Two Houses of Lancaster and York,
completed in 8 books in 1609.
• Michael Drayton's
Endimion and Phoebe
• Thomas Morley's
Balletts and
Canzonets
•
Sir Philip Sidney's
Defence of Poesie and sonnet sequence
Astrophel and Stella posthumously published
•
Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence
"Amoretti," and his wedding poem
"Epithalamion," both about Elizabeth Boyle
1596
• Sir John Davies'
Orchestra or a Poeme of Dauncing
•
Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queene, Books IV-VI,
Fowre Hymnes, and
Prothalamion
Deaths
George Peele (Representative Poetry Online); George Whythorne
1597
• Francis Bacon's
Essays, first edition
•
John Dowland (Representative Poetry Online):
The First Booke of Songes
• Joseph Hall's
Virgidemiarum
• Francis Mere's
Palladis Tamia, including
a critical survey of English writers, such as Shakespeare
Deaths
George Turberville (?)
1598
• Richard Barnfield's
The encomium of lady Pecunia;
or the praise of money
•
George Chapman's translation of Homer's
Iliad, I-II, VII-XI
• Christopher Marlowe's
Hero and Leander, posthumously published
Deaths
Alexander Montgomerie
1599
• Samuel Daniel's Musophilus
• Sir John Davies, in Hymnes of Astraea,
writes 26 acrostic poems dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.
• Shakespeare's The Passionate Pilgrim
1600
•
Englands Helicon, an anthology of
poems
•
Thomas Morley (Representative Poetry Online):
Madrigals
•
Thomas Nashe (Representative Poetry Online):
Summers Last Will and Testament (play)
•
John Dowland (Representative Poetry Online):
Second Booke of Songs
• Christopher Marlowe's translation of Lucan's
Pharsalia
posthumously published
• Thomas Weelkes'
Canto
Births
Charles I (Representative Poetry Online); John Ogilby (Scots.)
1601
• Robert Chester's
Loues martyr: or, Rosalins complaint
•
John Donne secretly weds Ann More, niece of his
employer, Sir Thomas Egerton
•
Thomas Morley's
First Booke of Ayres
• Shakespeare's
The Phoenix and the Turtle
published in Chester's
Loves Martyr
1602
•
Thomas Campion's
Observations in the Art of English Poesie
•
A Poetical Rhapsody, compiled by Francis and
Walter Davison
• Robert Southwell's
St. Peter's Complaint, with Other Poems
1603
JAMES I (-1625)
• Samuel Daniel's
Defence of Rhyme, a reply
to Thomas Campion's
Observations
•
John Dowland's
Third and Last Booke of Songs
• James VI of Scotland is crowned James I of
England
Births
Shackerly Marmion
1604
• Thomas Bateson's Cantus. The first set of English
Madrigales
Deaths
Thomas Churchyard
1605
• Bartas: his Devine weekes and works,
translated by Joshua Sylvester
1606
• Michael Drayton's Poems Lyric and Pastoral,
including "The Ballad of Agincourt"
1607
JAMESTOWN FOUNDED IN VIRGINIA
• Thomas Ford's Musicke of sundrie kindes
1608
1609
•
Shakespeares sonnets (including "A Lover's Complaint")
published by Thomas Thorpe
• John Wilbye's
The Second Set of Madrigales
1610
GALILEO SHOWS EARTH'S ROTATION AROUND THE SUN
• Giles Fletcher's
Christs Victory
and Triumph
•
Ben Jonson receives a royal pension, making
him unofficially the first British Poet Laureate
Births
Lucius Cary Falkland
1611
Deaths
Giles Fletcher the elder
1612
Deaths
Sir John Harington
1613
• William Browne's
Britannia's Pastorals, completed in 1616
• Richard Carew of Anthony's
"The Excellency of the English Tongue"
• Joshua Sylvester's
Lachrymae Lachrymarum
• George Wither's
Abuses Stript and Whipt
Deaths
Henry Constable
1615
1616
• George Chapman's translation of Homer's
Iliad
and
Odyssey
• William Drummond's
Poems
• Ben Jonson's
Works, including
"On
My First Son"
Births
Joseph Beaumont
1618
1619
1620
MAYFLOWER LANDS ON DEC. 22
• Martin Peerson's Private Musick
• Francis Quarles' A Feast for Worms
Births
Alexander Brome
1621
• George Sandys' verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1621-26)
Deaths
Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke, of smallpox
1622
• Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, II
• George Wither's Fidelia and Fair-virtue
1623
• William Drummond's Flowers of Sion
• Shakespeare's fellow actors John Heminge and
Henry Condell publish the first folio of his works
Births
Margaret Newcastle, duchess of Newcastle
1625
CHARLES I (-1649)
• third edition of Francis Bacon's
Essays
1626
1627
1628
• George Wither's Britain's Remembrancer,
about the 1625 London plague
1629
1630
• Michael Drayton's The muses Elizium
Births
Charles Cotton
1631
1632
• Walter Porter's Madrigales and ayres
• Francis Quarles' Divine Fancies
1633
• Certaine Learned and Elegant Works
by Fulke Greville, lord Brooke, including Caelica
• John Donne's Poems posthumously published
• Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island; or, The Isle of Man
• George Herbert's The Temple
Births
Wentworth Dillon (?)
1634
• John Milton's
"Comus performed
1635
• Francis Quarles' Emblemes
• George Wither's Emblems, Ancient and Moderne
1637
• John Milton's
Lycidas
in memory of Edward King
1638
•
Sir William D'Avenant made unofficial
British Poet Laureate
• Francis Quarles'
Hieroglyphikes of the Life
of Man
• Thomas Randolph's
Poems with the Muses looking-glasse
• Sir John Suckling's
Aglaura
1639
1640
• Thomas Carew's
Poems
• Ben Jonson's
Timber,
criticism on poets and poetry; and his translation of
Horace's
Ars Poetica
1642
Births
Thomas Shadwell (?)
1643
Deaths
Lucius Cary Falkland;
Aurelian Townshend
(?)
1644
1645
1646
• Richard Crashaw's Delights of the Muses and
Steps to the Temple
• Sir John Sucking's Fragmenta Aurea
• Henry Vaughan's Poems
1647
• John Cleveland's The Character of a London Diurnal
• Richard Corbet's Certain Elegant Poems
• Abraham Cowley's The Mistresse
1648
• Robert Herrick's Hesperides
1649
NO KING; GOVERNMENT BY COUNCIL (-1653)
• Richard Lovelace's Lucasta
Births
Elkanah Settle
1650
• Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans
• Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse
1651
Deaths
Lady Mary Sidney Wroth (?)
1652
• Edward Benlowe's Theophilia, or Love's Sacrifice
• Richard Crashaw's Carmen Deo Nostro
1653
OLIVER CROMWELL, LORD PROTECTOR (-1658)
• John Cleveland's Poems
• Margaret Newcastle's Poems and Fancies
Deaths
John Taylor the "water poet"
1654
Births
Sir Richard Blackmore
1655
• John Cotgrave's The English Treasury
of Literature and Language and Wits
Interpreter: The English Parnassus
1656
• Abraham Cowley's Poems
• Richard Crashaw's Carmen Del Nostro
1657
• Henry King's Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes and Sonnets
1658
RICHARD CROMWELL, LORD PROTECTOR (-1659)
Births
Charles Mordaunt, earl of Peterborough
1659
• Richard Lovelace's Last Remains
Births
Henry Purcell
1660
CHARLES II (-1685)
• John Dryden's Astraea Redux,
celebrating the restoration of the monarchy
1661
1662
• Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Book I
Births
William King;
John Smith
1663
• Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Book II
• Abraham Cowley's Verses upon Several
Occasions
1664
NEWTON FORMULATES THE LAW OF GRAVITY
1665
• Edward Herbert, lord Herbert of Cherbury's Occasional Verses
1666
1667
• Katherine Philips'
Poems
• John Dryden's
Annus Mirabilis
• John Milton's
Paradise Lost,
published in ten books
Births
Alicia D'Anvers, née Clarke;
John Pomfret;
John Reynolds;
John Richardson (?);
Jonathan Swift;
Edward Ward
1668
1669
1670
Births
William Congreve;
Sarah Fyge;
Bernard Mandeville
1671
Births
Colley Cibber;
Sarah Dixon (?)
1672
• Sir George Etherege's Poems
1673
• John Milton's Poems on Several Occasions,
revised edn.
Births
John Oldmixon (?);
Ambrose Philips
Deaths
Margaret Newcastle, duchess of Newcastle
1674
• John Milton's
"Paradise Lost (2nd edn.),
published in 12 books
• Thomas Rymer's translation of René Rapin's
Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie
1675
• John Wilmot, earl of Rochester's A
Satire against Mankind
Births
William Somervile
1676
Deaths
John Ogilby
1678
• Samuel Butler's
"Hudibras, Book III
• Anne Bradstreet's
Poems
• Henry Vaughan's
Thalia Rediviva
Births
John Winstanley (?)
1679
• John Oldham's Satire against Virtue
1680
• Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Part III
• Wentworth Dillon, 4th earl of Roscommon,
publishes a translation of Horace's Ars Poetica
• John Wilmot, earl of Rochester's Poems on several
Occasions
1681
1682
Births
Richardson Pack
1683
1684
• Wentworth Dillon's Essay on Translated Verse
• John Oldham's Poems and Translations
1685
JAMES II (-1688)
• Aphra Behn's Miscellany, being a collection of poems by several hands
• Edmund Waller's Divine Poems
• John Dryden's Sylvae
1686
• Anne Killigrew's Poems, to which
John Dryden contributed an ode in memory of
Anne Killigrew
1687
Deaths
Charles Cotton
1688
• John Dryden's Britannia Rediviva
• Thomas Shadwell made British Poet Laureate
Births
Laurence Eusden;
Alexander Pope;
Thomas Warton (?);
Leonard Welsted
1689
WILLIAM III (-1702) AND MARY II (-1694)
• Charles Cotton's Poems on Several Occasions
• Andrew Marvell's Poems on Affairs of State
published posthumously
1690
• Sir William Temple's essay "Of Poetry"
Births
Andrew Brice;
Mary Barber (?);
Mary Collier (?);
Samuel Croxall (?)
1691
• Alicia D'Anvers' Academia, or The Humours of the
University of Oxford
• Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas
1692
• Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen
• Nahum Tate made British Poet Laureate
Births
John Byrom;
Elizabeth Tollet
Deaths
Thomas Shadwell
1693
Births
Hildebrand Jacob
1694
Births
James Bramston (?);
Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield
1695
• Henry Purcell's The Indian Queen
1696
Births
Matthew Green;
William Oldys
1697
Births
Edward Chicken;
Thomas Edwards;
Richard Savage (?);
Hetty Wright
1698
• Aphra Behn's Poetical Remains
Births
Henry Baker
Deaths
Edward Littleton (?)
1699
• Thomas Traherne's A Serious and Pathetical Contemplation
of the Mercies of God
Births
Robert Blair;
John Ellis;
Leonard Howard (?);
Christopher Pitt;
Alexander Ross (Scotland)
Deaths
Joseph Beaumont
1700
• John Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern
and The Secular Masque
1701
• Daniel Defoe's
A True-born Englishman
• John Dennis'
The Advancement and
Reformation of Modern Poetry
• John Philips'
The Splendid Shilling
1702
ANNE (-1714)
• Sir Charles Sedley's Miscellaneous
Works, published posthumously
Births
Philip Doddridge;
Robert Nugent, earl Nugent;
Kenrick Prescot
Deaths
John Pomfret
1703
• Lady Mary Chudleigh's Poems upon
Several Occasions
• Sarah Fyge's Poems on Several Occasions
1704
Births
Moses Browne;
William Hamilton (Scotland);
Soame Jenyns
1705
• Joseph Addison's The Campaign, on
the victory at Blenheim
• John Philips' Blenheim
Births
Isaac Hawkins Browne;
Stephen Duck;
David Mallet (?)
1706
• Isaac Watts' Horae Lyricae
1707
• Matthew Prior's Poems on Several Occasions
• Isaac Watts' Hymns and Spiritual Songs
1708
Births
John Collier;
Sir Charles Hanbury Williams
1709
• First copyright law in England.
• Alexander Pope's
Pastorals
• Matthew Prior's
Poems on Several Occasions
• Jonathan Swift's "Description of a City Shower" and
"Description of the Morning"
Births
John Armstrong;
John Bancks;
Martha Brewster, née Wadsworth;
John Dalton;
Sneyd Davies;
William Dunkin (?);
Samuel Johnson
1710
Births
George Alexander Stevens;
Paul Whitehead
1711
Births
John Gambold;
Jupiter Hammon (US);
Henry Taylor
1712
• Sir Richard Blackmore's
Creation: a philosophical poem
• Alexander Pope's
The Rape of the Lock
published in Lintot's
Miscellanies, and enlarged in 1714
Births
Emanuel Collins (?);
Richard Glover;
Josiah Relph
Deaths
William King
1713
• Joseph Addison's Cato
• Anne Finch, countess of Winchelsea's Miscellany
Poems
• Alexander Pope's Windsor Forest
Births
Alison Cockburn (Scotland), née Rutherford (?);
Thomas Gilbert (?);
George Smith
Deaths
William Harrison;
Thomas Sprat
1714
GEORGE I (-1727)
• John Gay's The Shepherd's Week and The Fan
• the Scriblerus Club met January-July, a group
including John Gay, Thomas Parnell, Alexander Pope,
and Jonathan Swift
Deaths
Paul Whitehead
1715
• Alexander Pope's translation of
Homer's
Iliad, Book I, followed by Books
II in 1716, III in 1717, IV in 1718, and V-VI
in 1720.
• Nicholas Rowe mad British Poet Laureate
• Isaac Watts'
Divine Songs for the Use of Children,
including
"How doth the little busy Bee"
Births
John Brown;
Richard Jago;
Richard Graves;
William Whitehead
Deaths
Mary Monck;
Nahum Tate
1716
• John Gay's
Trivia or the Art of Walking the Streets
of London and
Court Poems
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
"Court Eclogues
1717
Births
Horace Walpole, earl of Oxford
Deaths
William Diaper;
David Garrick;
John Smith
1718
• Laurence Euston made British Poet Laureate
1719
• Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth, or Pills to
Purge Melancholy
• Isaac Watts' Psalms of David
Births
James Cawthorn;
James Eyre Weeks (?)
1720
• John Gay's Poems on Several Occasions
1721
• Thomas Parnell's Night-Piece on Death
• Jonathan Swift's Letter of Advice to a
Young Poet
Births
Mark Akenside (Representative Poetry Online);
William Collins (Representative Poetry Online); James Grainger;
Matthew Prior (Representative Poetry Online); Tobias Smollett; William Wilkie (Scotland)
1722
• Thomas Parnell's Poems on Several Occasions
1723
1724
Births
Christopher Anstey;
Frances Brooke;
Evan Lloyd;
William Mason
Deaths
Elkanah Settle
1725
• Orpheus Caledonius: or a
Collection of the Best Scotch Songs,
compiled by William Thomson
• Alexander Pope's translation of
Homer's Odyssey, Books I-III
(with William Broome and Elijah Fenton),
books IV-V to follow in 1726
• Edward Young's Love of Fame,
the Universal Passion (1725-28)
Deaths
Alicia D'Anvers
1726
• Henry Carey's
"Namby Pamby,
including fragments of many still-popular nursery rhymes,
such as "London Bridge is broken down"
• Thomson's
"Winter
1727
GEORGE II (-1760)
• John Gay's
Fables, I,
to be followed by II in 1738, but completed
only in 1750.
• Alexander Pope's
Peri Bathous, or
the Art of Sinking in Poetry, a parody of
Longinus's treatise on the sublime
• Thomson's
"Summer
Births
Thomas Cole (?)
Deaths
John Reynolds
1728
• John Gay's
Beggar's Opera
• Alexander Pope's
"The Dunciad,
Books I-III, followed by
Book IV (the
New
Dunciad) in 1742, and completed in 1743
• James Thomson's
Spring
Deaths
Richardson Pack
1729
• Alexander Pope's The Dunciad Variorum
Deaths
Sir Richard Blackmore;
William Congreve;
Edward Taylor
1730
• Colley Cibber made British Poet Laureate
• Stephen Duck's Poems
• Aaron Hill's The Progress of Wit
• James Thomson's The Seasons,
including Autumn
Deaths
Laurence Eusden
1731
• Alexander Pope's Of Taste and
four Moral Essays (1731-35)
1732
• John Gay's libretto for Handel's Acis and
Galatea
Births
John Carr;
William Falconer;
Thomas Morris
1733
• Alexander Pope's
An Essay on Man,
completed 1734, and
Imitations of Horace,
Book I, followed by Book II in 1734
Births
Isaac Bickerstaffe;
Robert Lloyd
Deaths
Bernard Mandeville
1734
• Mary Barber's Poems on Several Occasions
Births
John Maclaurin, lord Dreghorn
Deaths
Edward Littleton
1735
• Alexander Pope's
Epistle to
Dr Arbuthnot
• William Somervile's
The Chace
• James Thomson's
Liberty, parts
I-III ("Italy," "Greece," and "Rome"),
followed in 1736 by parts IV-V ("Britain"
and "The Prospect")
Deaths
Charles Mordaunt, earl of Peterborough
1736
1737
• Alexander Pope's
"Imitations of Horace
• William Shenstone's
Poems upon Various
Occasions, including "
The Schoolmistress"
• Jonathan Swift's
Poems on Several Occasions
• John Wesley's
Psalms and Poems
Births
Joseph Mather
Deaths
Matthew Green
1738
• Samuel Johnson's London
• Jonathan Swift's The Beasts' Confession
Births
Mary Darwall;
John Wolcot
1739
Births
Edward Thompson (?)
Deaths
Hildebrand Jacob
1740
1741
• About this time Thomas Seaton
established the Seatonian Prize at
Cambridge University for religious
poetry
• William Whitehead's The Danger
of Writing Verse
Births
William Combe
1742
Births
Mary Alcock (?);
Anne Hunter (Scotland);
Thomas Penrose;
Anna Seward
Deaths
John Oldmixon;
William Somervile
1743
• Robert Blair's The Grave
• Alexander Pope's The New Dunciad
Deaths
James Bramston;
Henry Carey (?);
Andrew Michael Ramsay;
Josiah Relph;
Richard Savage
1744
• Mark Akenside's Pleasures of
Imagination, revised 1757
• Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book,
with "Baa, baa, black sheep"
• Joseph Warton's The Enthusiast
• John and Charles Wesley's A
Collection of Psalms and Hymns
1745
Births
William Crowe;
Charles Dibdin;
William Hayley;
Thomas Holcroft;
Hannah More;
Charles Morris;
Henry James Pye
Deaths
Sarah Dixon;
Jonathan Richardson;
Jonathan Swift;
Thomas Warton the elder
1746
• William Collins' Odes on Several
Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (dated 1747)
• John Warton's Odes on Various Subjects
Births
Michael Bruce
Deaths
Robert Blair;
Edward Chicken;
Mary Leapor, from measles
1747
Births
John Aikin;
Susanna Blamire;
John O'Keeffe
Deaths
Thomas Gilbert;
Leonard Welsted
1748
• Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems,
1848-58
• Mary Leapor's Poems upon Several
Occasions (1748-51), posthumously published
• James Thomson's The Castle of
Indolence
1749
Deaths
Ambrose Philips
1750
• James Thomson's posthumous Poems
on Several Occasions
Births
Lady Anne Barnard (Scotland);
Sophia Burrell;
Robert Fergusson (Scotland);
Lady Anne Lindsay;
John Taylor;
John Trumbull (US)
Deaths
Aaron Hill;
John Winstanley;
Hetty Wright
1751
Deaths
John Bancks;
Philip Doddridge
1752
• Christopher Smart's Poems on
Several Occasions
Births
Thomas Chatterton;
Philip Morin Freneau (US);
Edmund Gardner (?);
Joseph Ritson;
Ann Yearsley, née Cromartie
1753
• John and Charles Wesley's Hymns and
Spiritual Songs
Deaths
George Berkeley
1754
• Thomas Gray's The Progress of Poesy
Births
John Codrington Bampfylde;
Joel Barlow (US);
George Crabbe;
Thomas Maurice
Deaths
Elizabeth Tollet
1755
Births
George Dyer;
George Galloway (?);
Robert Merry;
Andrew Macdonald (?)
1756
• John Warton's Essay on the
Writings and Genius of Pope
Births
Edward Rushton;
Jane Cave (by this year)
Deaths
Stephen Duck, by suicide
1757
• Edmund Burke's
Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful
• John Dyer's
The Fleece
•
Odes by Mr. Gray, including
"
The Progress of Poesy"
• William Whitehead made British Poet Laureate after
Thomas Gray refuses it
1758
Births
Sir George Dallas;
Joseph Fawcett (?);
William Parsons (?);
Mary Robinson
1759
ENGLISH UNDER WOLFE WIN QUEBEC
Deaths
Martha Brewster (after this year);
William Collins;
Sir Charles Hanbury Williams
1760
GEORGE II (-1820)
• James Macpherson's Fragments
of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the
Highlands
• The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story-book,
with "Little Boy Blue"
Births
Richard Polwhele
Deaths
Isaac Hawkins Browne
1761
• Charles Churchill's The Rosciad and
The Apology
Births
Anabella Plumptre;
John Williams
Deaths
James Cawthorn;
William Oldys
1762
• Charles Churchill's
"The Ghost,
Books I-III, followed by Book IV in 1763
• William Falconer's
The Shipwreck,
revised in 1764 and 1769
• James Macpherson's
Fingal, an Ancient
Epic Poem
Births
Joanna Baillie;
James Bisset (?);
William Lisle Bowles;
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges;
George Colman the younger;
James Hurdis;
Thomas Russell
1763
• Hugh Blair's
A Critical
Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian
• James Macpherson's
Temora
• Christopher Smart's
"Song to David
Births
John Hurdis;
Samuel Rogers
1764
Births
Elizabeth Cobbold;
John Thelwall
1765
Births
Manoah Bodman (US);
William Taylor
Deaths
Jean Adams;
William Dunkin;
David Mallet;
Edward Young
1766
• Isaac D'Israeli's The Literary Character
Births
Laurence Hynes Halleran
Deaths
Robert Andrews (?);
John Brown;
James Grainger;
Catherine Jemmat
1767
• John and Charles Wesley's Hymns
for the Use of Families
Births
John Quincy Adams (US)
Deaths
Michael Bruce;
Leonard Howard
1768
• Thomas Gray's
Poems,
including
"The Fatal Sisters" and "The
Descent of Odin"
• Lady Mary Montagu's
Poetical Works
Births
William Shepherd
Deaths
Thomas Mozeen
1769
DISCOVERY OF AUSTRALIA
Deaths
William Falconer, by drowning;
Sneyd Davies
1770
1771
1772
• William Jones' Poems from Asiatic
Languages
• John Trumbull's The Progress of Dulness
Deaths
James Graeme;
William Wilkie
1773
Births
Reginald Heber
Deaths
Andrew Brice;
John Cunningham;
Philip Dormer Stanhope, earl of Chesterfield
1774
•
History of English Poetry
by Thomas Warton, the younger, in 3 vols.,
1774-1781
• Oliver Goldsmith's
"Retaliation; a poem
Deaths
Henry Baker;
James Dance;
Lady Dorothea Du Bois;
Robert Fergusson;
Oliver Goldsmith;
Charles Jenner
1775
1776
AMERICAN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (JULY 4)
Births
Lady Morgan, née Sydney Owenson;
Charles Newton (?)
Deaths
Evan Lloyd;
George Smith
1777
• Thomas Chatterton's Poems,
supposed to have been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley,
edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt
Deaths
Francis Fawkes;
Horace Walpole, earl of Oxford
1778
Births
Sir Humphrey Davy;
William Hazlitt;
John Kirke Paulding (US)
1779
• Samuel Johnson's The Works of
the English Poets (1779-81), 52 critical
biographies
Deaths
John Armstrong;
David Garrick;
John Langhorne;
Thomas Penrose;
Kenrick Prescot
1780
• George Crabbe's The Candidate
Births
George Croly;
Anna Maria Porter
1781
• George Crabbe's The Library
Births
Ebenezer Elliott
Deaths
Richard Jago
1782
• William Cowper's Poems
1783
PEACE OF VERSAILLES: ENGLAND RECOGNIZES USA
• William Blake's
Poetical
Sketches
• Jane Cave's
Poems on Various Subjects
• George Crabbe's
"The Village
•
Orlando Furioso, translated by
John Hoole
Deaths
Henry Brooke;
John Scott
1784
1785
• William Cowper's The Task in 6 Books
• Thomas Warton made British Poet Laureate
Deaths
Richard Glover;
Henry Taylor;
William Whitehead
1786
• Robert Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the
Scottish Dialect
• Philp Morin Freneau's Poems
Births
Barron Field (Australia);
Brian Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall; Brit.)
Deaths
John Collier;
Jupiter Hammon (?);
Edward Thompson
1787
Births
Richard Henry Dana (US);
Margaret Davidson (US);
Mary Russell Mitford
Deaths
Moses Browne;
Soame Jenyns
1788
• Peter Pindar's Poetical Works
1789
GEORGE WASHINGTON BECOMES PRESIDENT OF USA
• William Blake's
Songs of
Innocence and
"The Book
of Thel
• Erasmus Darwin's
The Loves of the Plants,
republished in 1791 as
The
Botanic Garden, part II
Deaths
Frances Brooke;
Frances Greville
1790
• William Blake's The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell
• Henry James Pye made British Poet Laureate
• Literary Fund Society established by David
Williams (by 1818 the Royal
Literary Fund) to aid indigent authors
Births
Fitz-Greene Halleck (US)
1791
1792
• William Blake's Song of Liberty
• Samuel Rogers' The Pleasures of Memory
1793
• William Blake's Visions of the
Daughters of Albion and America, A
Prophecy
• Robert Burns' Poems
• William Wordsworth's An Evening
Walk and Descriptive Sketches
1794
Births
Maria Gowen Brooks (?);
William Cullen Bryant (US);
Carlos Wilcox (US)
Deaths
Susanna Blamire;
Alison Cockburn
1795
• William Blake's The Book of Los,
The Book of Ahania, The
Song of Los, and The Songs of
Innocence and Experience
• Philip Morin Freneau's Poems
• Walter Savage Landor's Poems
• Robin Hood: A Collection of all the
Ancient Poems, edited by Joseph Ritson
Births
Thomas Carlyle;
George Darley;
Joseph Rodman Drake (US);
John Keats;
James Gates Percival;
Janet Thomson (Scotland)
Deaths
Samuel Bishop
1796
• Joel Barlow's The Hasty Pudding
• S. T. Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects
Births
John Gardiner Calkins Brainard (US);
Hartley Coleridge;
Eliza Dunlop (Australia);
John Hamilton Reynolds
1797
• William Blake illustrates Edward Young's
Night Thoughts
• S. T. Coleridge composes
"Kubla Khan"
in an opium-induced dream and writes down only a fragment of it on waking.
• Robert Southey's
Poems
Births
Thomas Haynes Bayley;
George Moses Horton (US), about this time;
William Motherwell (Scotland)
Deaths
John Codrington Bampfylde;
George Keate;
William Mason
1798
• G. Canning and J. H. Frere
parody Erasmus Darwin's
The Loves
of the Plants in their "The Loves
of the Triangles"
• first edition of
Lyrical
Ballads by William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (with
Coleridge's
Rime of the Ancient
Mariner), revised in 1800 and 1802
Births
Macdonald Clarke (US);
Samuel Henry Dickson (US);
David Macbeth Moir (Scotland)
Deaths
Mary Alcock;
Edmund Gardner;
Robert Merry
1799
Present-day English 1800-present
1800
• the life and works of Robert Burns published
1801
THOMAS JEFFERSON, PRESIDENT OF USA
• Thomas Moore's Poems by Thomas Little
• Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer
Deaths
James Hurdis
1802
•
Ancient English Metrical Romances, edited
by Joseph Ritson
• S. T. Coleridge's
"Dejection: An Ode"
• Walter Savage Landor's
Poetry by the Author of Gebir
• Amelia Opie's
Poems
• Sir Walter Scott's
Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border (1802-03), an anthology of ballads
Deaths
Erasmus Darwin
1803
1804
• William Blake's
"Jerusalem, completed
in 1820, and his
"Milton,
completed in 1808
• Ann and Jane Taylor's
Original Poems for Infant Minds
• William Wordsworth's "Daffodils"
Births
Nathaniel Hawthorne (US);
Joseph Howe (Canada);
Francis Sylvester Mahony, aka Father Prout;
Charles Whitehead
Deaths
Joseph Fawcett;
Richard Graves;
Joseph Mather
1805
• H. F. Cary's translation of Dante's
Inferno
•
The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog
• Sir Roger Newdigate founds the Newdigate
Prize for English Poetry at Oxford
• Sir Walter Scott's
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel
• Robert Southey's
Madoc
• William Wordsworth finishes a first version of
"The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind
in 13 Books
Deaths
Christopher Anstey;
Sophia Burrell
1806
Births
Elizabeth Barrett, later Browning;
William Gilmore Simms (US);
Nathaniel Parker Willis (US)
1807
• Joel Barlow's
The Columbiad
• Lord Byron's
Hours of Idleness and
Poems
on Various Occasions
• George Crabbe's
Poems and "The Parish Register"
• Thomas Moore's
Irish Melodies
• William Wordsworth's
Poems in Two Volumes,
including
"Intimations of Immortality"
Deaths
John Carr;
John Newton
1808
Deaths
Isaac Bickerstaffe (?);
John Freeth;
Thomas Moss
1809
• Lord Byron's
"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers;
Byron spent the next two years abroad, notably in Greece
• T. Campbell's
Gertrude of Wyoming
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
The Friend 1809-10
• Charles and Mary Lamb's
Poetry for Children
Deaths
Mrs. Hannah Cowley;
Thomas Holcroft;
Anna Seward
1810
• William Blake's engravings for Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
•
Gammer Gurton's Garland or the Nursery
Parnassus, including "Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep"
• George Crabbe's
The Borough in 24 epistles,
including one on "
Peter Grimes, a poem based on Aldeburgh
• Sir Walter Scott's
"The Lady of the Lake
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Original Poetry
by Victor and Cazire and
Zastrozzi
1811
• Sir Walter Scott's The Vision of
Don Roderick
• Oxford University expells Percy Bysshe Shelley
1812
• Lord Byron's Childe Harold, Parts I-II,
and The Curse of Minerva
• H. F. Cary's translation of Dante's Purgatorio
and Paradiso
• Robert Southey's and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge's Omniana (prose)
Deaths
Joel Barlow
1813
• Lord Byron's
The Bride of Abydos
and
The Giaour
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
Remorse
• Sir Walter Scott's
"Rokeby and
The
Bride of Triermain
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"Queen Mab
• Robert Southey made British Poet Laureate
Births
William Edmondstone Aytoun (Scotland);
Charles Timothy Brooks (US);
Christopher Pearse Cranch (US);
Epes Sargent (US);
Jones Very (US)
Deaths
Henrietta Battier;
Jane Cave;
Henry James Pye
1814
• Lord Byron's
The Corsair,
"Lara,
and
Ode to Napoleon
• Augusta Gordon bore her half-brother Lord Byron's
daughter
• Francis Scott Key on Sept. 14 writes
"The Star-Spangled Banner" during the British attack on
Baltimore, Maryland
• Robert Southey's
Roderick, the Last of the Goths
• William Wordsworth's
The Excursion
Deaths
Charles Dibdin;
Samuel Jackson Pratt;
Edward Rushton
1815
• Lord Byron's
Hebrew Melodies,
including
"The Destruction of Sennacherib"
• marriage of Lord Byron to Annabella Milbanke
• Philip Morin Freneau's
Poems
• Leigh Hunt was jailed (1815-17) for
criticizing the Prince Regent in
The Examiner
• Sir Walter Scott's
The Lord of the Isles
• William Wordsworth's
Poems
Deaths
George Ellis;
Samuel Henley
1816
• Lord Byron's
The Prisoner of Chillon
and other Poems,
"Childe Harold,
Part III, and
The Siege of Corinth; he leaves England
permanently for Geneva
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge's
Christabel and
Other Poems, including
"Kubla Khan"
• Leigh Hunt publishes an essay on
Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats in
The
Examiner, and
The Story of Rimini
• John Keats is certified as an apothecary
and publishes
"On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer"
• Percy Bysshe Shelley marries Mary
Woolstonecraft Godwin
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Alastor and
Other Poems
• Robert Southey's
A Poet's Pilgrimage
to Waterloo
Births
Philip James Bailey;
Charlotte Brontë;
Shirley Brooks (Representative Poetry Online); Frances Brown (Browne); Josiah D. Canning (US); Philip Pendleton Cooke (US); Charles Heavysege (Canada)
1817
• Lord Byron's
"Manfred and
The
Lament of Tasso
• S. T. Coleridge's
Biographia
Literaria, Vol. I
• John Keats'
Poems
• John Gibson Lockhart in the October
Blackwood's
Magazine vilifies
the "Cockney School of Poetry," said to
include Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, John Keats and
others
• Thomas Moore's
"Lalla Rookh
• Sir Walter Scott's
Harold the Dauntless
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Laon and Cythna
Births
Cornelius Mathews (US);
Henry David Thoreau (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
John McPherson (Canada)
Deaths
Ann Batten Cristall (this year or after)
1818
• Lord Byron's
"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
Book IV, and
Beppo
• John Wilson Croker's anonymous review attacks
John Keats'
Endymion in the
Quarterly Review
• William Hazlitt's
Lectures on the English
Poets
• Leigh Hunt's
Foliage
• John Keats'
"Endymion published; he falls in love with
Fanny Brawne (1800-65) and writes his
great odes this year and the next
• Thomas Love Peacock's
Rhododaphne
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
The Revolt of
Islam, originally
Laon and
Cythna (1817); he leaves England.
Deaths
Matthew Gregory Lewis;
John Williams
1819
• Lord Byron's
Mazeppa and
"Don
Juan, I and II
• John Keats falls sick and his writing ceases
after
"To Autumn" in September
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
The Cenci
and
Rosalind and Helen; he writes
"Ode to the West Wind" on October 1819
in a wood by the Arno River near Florence
• William Wordsworth's
Peter Bell
and
The Waggoner
Deaths
John Wolcot
1820
GEORGE III (-1830)
• Elizabeth Barrett's
The Battle of Marathon
• John Clare's
Poems, Descriptive of
Rural Life and Scenery
• Introduction of the limerick in
The
History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women
• John Keats'
Lamia, The Eve of St. Agnes,
Hyperion, and Other Poems
• Thomas Love Peacock's
The Four Ages of
Poetry, which sparked Shelley to write his
Defence of Poetry
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Prometheus
Unbound and Other Poems, and his essay
on a philosophical view of reform (published in 1920)
• William Wordsworth's
The River
Duddon and
Vaudracour and
Julia
• formation of the Apostles, a Cambridge intellectual
society
Deaths
Joseph Rodman Drake;
William Hayley;
James Woodhouse
1821
• William Cullen Bryant's
Poems
• John Clare's
The Village Minstrel
• John Hamilton Reynolds'
The Garden
of Florence
• Percy Bysshe Shelley publishes
Epipsychidion
and
Adonais (on John Keats) and writes
his
Defence of Poetry
• Robert Southey's
A Vision of Judgement
Deaths
Anne Hunter;
John Keats (Feb., in Rome), of tuberculosis
1822
• Lord Byron's
Werner and his review of
Robert Southey's "The Vision of Judgement" in
The
Liberal
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"Hellas
Births
Matthew Arnold;
Thomas Buchanan Read (US);
Charles Sangster (Canada);
James Monroe Whitfield (US)
1823
Deaths
William Combe;
Charles Wolfe
1824
• Lord Byron's
Don Juan, XV-XVI, and
The
Deformed Transformed,
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"The Triumph of Life"
Deaths
Lord Byron, by fever in Greece;
Elizabeth Cobbold;
Thomas Maurice
1825
1826
• Elizabeth Barrett (Browning)'s An Essay on
Mind and Other Poems
1827
• John Clare's The Shepherd's
Calendar
• Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane and
Other Poems
Births
Rose Terry Cooke (US); Francis Miles Finch (US);
James McIntyre, poet of the mammoth cheese (Canada); John Hollin Ridge (US); John Townsend Trowbridge (US);
Septimus Winner (Representative Poetry Online)
1828
• Felicia Hemans' Records of Women, with Other
Poems
• John Gibson Lockhart's Life of Robert Burns
Deaths
John Gardiner Calkins Brainard;
Lady Caroline Lamb;
Edward Coote Pinkney
1829
• Thomas Hood's The Dream of Eugene
Aram
• Edgar Allan Poe's Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Other
Poems
• Samuel Kettell's Specimens of American Poetry
Deaths
William Crowe;
Sir Humphry Davy
1830
WILLIAM IV (-1837)
• Ebenezer Elliott's
Corn Law Rhymes
• Sarah Josepha Hale's
Poems for
our Children, including "
Mary's Lamb"
• Alfred Tennyson's
Poems,
Chiefly Lyrical, including "The Kraken"
Deaths
William Hazlitt
1831
• Walter Savage Landor's Gebir, Count Julian
• Edgar Allan Poe's Poems
1832
1833
• Robert Browning's
Pauline
•
Hartley Coleridge's
Poems, Songs and Sonnets
• J. S. Mill's "Thoughts on Poetry and its Variants"
Births
Richard Watson Dixon;
Adam Lindsay Gordon (Australia);
Edmund Clarence Stedman (US)
Deaths
Sir George Dallas;
Arthur Hallam, in whose memory Alfred lord Tennyson will write
In Memoriam;
Hannah More;
John O'Keeffe;
William Sotheby
1834
• Thomas Moore's Irish Melodies
• Thomas Pringle's African Sketches
1835
• Robert Browning's Paracelsus
• John Clare's The Rural Muse
• William Wordsworth's Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems
1836
• Lyra Apostolica, religious poems
by several authors, including John Newman
Births
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (US);
W. S. Gilbert; Bret Harte (US);
Sarah Morgan Piatt (US);
Annie Louisa Walker (Canada)
Deaths
George Colman the younger;
William Taylor
1837
VICTORIA I (-1901)
• Richard H. Barham's
Ingoldsby Legends
• The Civil List Act provides for pensions
for needy authors in England.
• John Clare is institutionalized as insane.
• Eliza Cook's
"The Old Arm Chair"
• George Moses Horton's
Hope of Liberty -- Poems
by a Slave (2nd edn.; first published as early as 1829)
• Thomas Love Peacock's
The Paper Money
Lyrics
Deaths
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges
1838
• Elizabeth Barrett's
The Seraphim
• Leigh Hunt publishes
"Abou Ben Adhem"
• William Wordsworth's
Sonnets
Births
Henry Adams (US);
Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael (US);
John Hay (US);
William Reed Huntington (US);
Charles Mair (Canada);
Abram Joseph Ryan (US);
Margaret E. Sangster
Deaths
Margaret Miller Davidson;
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, likely by suicide;
Charles Morris;
Annabella Plumptre;
Richard Polwhele
1839
1840
• Robert Browning's
Sordello
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's
Defence of
Poetry, posthumously published
1841
Births
Mathilde Blind;
Robert Williams Buchanan;
Charles Edward Carryl (US);
Joaquin Miller (US);
Edward Rowland Sill (US)
1842
• Robert Browning's
Dramatic Lyrics,
including
"My Last Duchess" and
"The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's
Poems
on Slavery
• Thomas Babington Macaulay's
Lays
of Ancient Rome, including
"Horatius"
• Alfred Tennyson's
Poems,
including
"Locksley Hall,"
"Morte d'Arthur,"
and
"Ulysses"
• William Wordsworth's
Poems
Chiefly of Early and Late Years
Deaths
Thomas Arnold;
Macdonald Clarke;
Samuel Woodworth
1843
Births
Charles Montagu Doughty;
Violet Fane aka Mary Montgomerie Lamb
1844
• Isabella Banks' Ivy Leaves,
including "Neglected Wife"
• William Barnes' Poems of Rural
Life in the Dorset Dialect
• Elizabeth Barrett's Poems
Deaths
Thomas Campbell;
Margaret Davidson
1845
• Robert Browning's
Dramatic Romances and
Lyrics, including "How They Brought the Good
News from Ghent to Aix"
• George Moses Horton's
Poetical Works
• Edgar Allan Poe's
The Raven and Other
Poems, including
"The Raven"
1846
• Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
are married in Sept. and elope to Italy, where
they settle in Casa Guidi in Florence
• Robert Browning's Bells and
Pomegranates
• Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë,
and Anne Brontë's Poems by
Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, edited by
Charlotte Brontë
• Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense,
revised in 1861 and 1863
1847
• Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Poems
• Walter Savage Landor's
The Hellenics
• Henry Wadworth Longfellow's
The Belfy of Bruges
and other Poems
• "
Henry Francis Lyte composes "Abide with Me"
• Alfred lord Tennyson's
The Princess,
including "
Tears, idle Tears," which he adds to
up to 1850
1848
• James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics
• pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in London, lasting until about
1880, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John
Everett Millais, Elizabeth Siddal, and others
1849
• Matthew Arnold's The Strayed
Reveller and Other Poems
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline
1850
• Thomas Lowell Beddoes'
Death's Jest-book,
published posthumously
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Poems
with "Sonnets from the Portuguese,"
including
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways
• Robert Browning's
Christmas Eve and Easter Day
• Stephen Foster's
"De Camptown Races"
• Leigh Hunt's
Autobiography
• D. G. Rossetti's
The Blessed Damozel, published
in
The Gem
• Alfred Tennyson publishes
In Memoriam
and is made British Poet Laureate.
• William Wordsworth's
The Prelude, published
posthumously in 14 Books.
1851
Deaths
Joanna Baillie;
David Macbeth Moir
1852
1853
Births
Ernest Fenollosa (US)
1854
• Julia Ward Howe's
Passion Flowers
• Coventry Patmore's
The Angel in the House,
Part I (Part II in 1856, Part III in 1860; and Part IV in 1863)
• Alfred Tennyson's "
Charge of the Light Brigade,"
published in
The Examiner on Dec. 9
1855
• Matthew Arnold's
Poems, Second Series
• Robert Browning's
Men and Women, including
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
• Lewis Carroll's
"Jabberwocky"
•
Caroline Hayward
(Canada) active about this time
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's
Hiawatha
• Alfred lord Tennyson's
Maud and Other Poems
• Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass, regularly
amplified (2nd edn., 1856; final author's edition, 1891-92)
Deaths
Charlotte Brontë;
Mary Russell Mitford;
Samuel Rogers;
Dorothy Wordsworth
1856
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Aurora Leigh
(post-dated 1857), a verse novel in 11,000 lines about a woman writer
• Sydney Dobell's
England in Time of War
• Coventry Patmore's
The Espousals
Births
Toru Dutt (India);
Alfred Denis Godley;
Lizette Woodworth Reese (US)
Deaths
James Gates Percival
1857
• Frederick Locker Lampson's London Lyrics
(12 re-editions to 1893)
1858
• William Barnes'
Hwomely Rhymes: A second
collection of poems of rural life in the Dorset Dialect
• William Johnson Cory's
Ionica
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's
The
Courtship of Miles Standish
• William Morris'
The Defence of
Guenevere and Other Poems
• Adelaide Anne Procter's
Legends and
Lyrics (1858-61), including
"A Lost Chord"
Deaths
Thomas Holley Chivers
1859
CHARLES DARWIN'S ORIGIN OF SPECIES
• Daniel Decatur Emmett's
"Dixie's Land"
• Edmund Fitzgerald's
The
Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám, revised up to 1879
• Alfred lord Tennyson's
Idylls of
the King, including "Enid,"
"Vivien," "Elaine," and "Guinevere"
1860
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF USA
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems
before Congress
• Coventry Patmore's Faithful for
Ever
Births
Helena Jane Coleman (Canada); Hamlin Garland (US); Harriet Monroe (US);
Charles G. D. Roberts (Canada); Clinton Scollard (US);
Harry Dacre (Representative Poetry Online)
Deaths
Richard Croly;
James Kirke Paulding
1861
CONFEDERATE STATES TAKE FORT SUMTER ON APRIL 12: AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Last
Poems, posthumously published
• Julia Ward Howe composes
"Battle Hymn of the Republic"
• Francis Turner Palgrave's
The Golden Treasury,
a poetic anthology revised in 1897 and since then
by others
• Annie Louisa Walker's
Leaves
from the Backwoods
1862
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning's posthumous
Last
Poems, edited by Robert Browning
• Charles Calverley's
Verses and Translations
• A. H. Clough's
Last Poems,
posthumously published
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's
Tales of
a Wayside Inn, including
"Paul Revere's
Ride"
• George Meredith's
Modern Love
and
Poems of the Roadside
• Coventry Patmore's
Victories of
Love
• Christina Rossetti's
Goblin Market
and Other Poems
• in February Dante Gabriel Rossetti places a sheaf of
poems (a few years later retrieved) in the coffin of his wife Elizabeth Siddal
1863
1864
Births
Miguel de Unamuno (Spain); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Mary Gilmore (Australia); Richard Hovey (US); A. B. ("Banjo") Paterson (Australia)
1865
LINCOLN ASSASSINATED; CIVIL WAR ENDS; SLAVERY
ABOLISHED DEC. 18
Deaths
George Arnold;
William Edmondstone Aytoun;
Abraham Lincoln (US);
Lydia Howard Sigourney;
Isaac Williams
1866
• Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael's
Poems
• Christina Rossetti's
The Prince's Progress
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's
Poems and Ballads,
1st series, including
"Dolores"
• John Greenleaf Whittier's
Snow-Bound
1867
DOMINION OF CANADA ESTABLISHED ON JULY 1
• Matthew Arnold's
New Poems,
including
"Dover Beach"
• Lewis Carroll's
The Hunting of the
Snark
• Ralph Waldo Emerson's
May-Day
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's
Song of Italy
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation
of Dante's
Divine Comedy
Deaths
Charles Baudelaire (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Fitz-Greene Halleck; John Hollin Ridge; Alexander Smith; Henry Timrod; Nathaniel Parker Willis; Forceythe Willson
1868
• Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, in 12 Books and
over 21,000 lines (1868-69)
• Frederick James Furnivall founds the Chaucer Society
• William Morris' The Earthly Paradise, I, completed
in 1870
Deaths
Adah Isaacs Monken
1869
• W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Poems
• Alfred lord Tennyson's The Holy Grail and
Other Poems, with "The Coming of Arthur,"
"The Holy Grail," "Pelleas and Ettarre," and
"The Passing of Arthur"
Deaths
Charlotte Alington Barnard
1870
• Adam Lindsay Gordon's
Bush Ballads and
Galloping Rhymes
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
Poems,
including "Jenny" and a fragment of "
The House of
Life"
• mathematician James Joseph Sylvester
publishes his
The Laws of Verse
Births
Hilaire Belloc (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Christopher John Brennan (Australia); Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas; Eva Selena Gore-Booth (Ireland); Thomas Sturge Moore;
Lena Guilbert Ford (Representative Poetry Online)
1871
• Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking Glass,
including
"Jabberwocky"
• Edward Lear's
Nonsense Songs, including
"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat"
• Thomas Maitland (i.e., Robert Williams
Buchanan) attacks Dante Gabriel Rossetti in "The
Fleshly School of Poetry" in
Contemporary
Review (Oct.); and Rossetti replies in "The Stealthy
School of Criticism" in
Athenaeum (Dec.)
• Joaquin Miller's
Songs of the Sierras
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's
Songs before Sunrise
• Alfred lord Tennyson's "The Last Tournament"
• Walt Whitman's
Passage to India
1872
• Edward Lear's More Nonsense, Rhymes
• William Morris' Love is Enough
• Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song, a Nursery
Rhyme Book
• Alfred lord Tennyson's "Gareth and Lynette"
1873
• William Morris's Love is Enough
Births
Gilbert E. Brooke (Singapore);
George Herbert Clarke (Canada);
Walter De la Mare;
George Cabot Lodge (US);
Alexander L. Posey (US)
1874
Deaths
Shirley Brooks (Representative Poetry Online); Sydney Thompson Dobell; Brian Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall)
1875
• Robert Browning's Aristophane's Apology
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Masque of
Pandora
Births
Edmund Clerihew Bentley; Anna Branch (US); Alice Dunbar-Nelson (US; wife of Paul L. Dunbar)
Rainer Maria Rilke (Prague); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1876
• Robert Browning's Pacchiarotto and How He
Worked in Distemper
• Brewster Higley's "Home on the Range"
• William Morris' The Story of Sigurd the Volsung,
and the Fall of the Niblungs
Births
Sarah Cleghorn (US)
1877
• Coventry Patmore's The Unknown Eros and Other Odes
• Edward Lear's Laughable Lyrics
Deaths
Toru Dutt (India), of pulmonary tuberculosis
1878
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and
Ballads, 2nd series
Deaths
William Cullen Bryant;
Frank Oliver Call (Canada);
Bayard Taylor;
George Boyer Vashon;
Sarah Helen Whitman
1879
THOMAS EDISON PATENTS THE ELECTRIC LIGHTBULB
• Robert Browning's Dramatic Idyls,
including "Ivàn Ivànovitch"
• Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The
Pirates of Penzance
• Alfred lord Tennyson's Ballads and
Other Poems
1880
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Ultima
Thule
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's The Heptalogia
• Seven Balliol College Oxford members led by
H. C. Beeching and J. W. Mackail publish The
Masque of B-ll--l, which is immediately suppressed by authorities
1881
• Frederick James Furnivall founds the Browning Society
• Christina Rossetti's A Pageant, and other Poems
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Ballads and
Sonnets, with "The House of Life" complete,
and Poems
• Oscar Wilde's Poems
Births
Franklin Pierce Adams; Clive Bell; Witter Bynner (US); Lascelles Abercrombie; Padraic Colum (Ireland); Eleanor Farjeon
1882
• F. J. Child's edition of English and Scottish Popular
Ballads, in 5 vols. (1882-98): multiple versions of
305 ballads
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's In the Harbor
Births
Martin Donisthorpe Armstrong; John Drinkwater; James Joyce (Ireland);
Mina Loy (Representative Poetry Online); A. A. Milne;
E.J. Pratt (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Anne Spencer (US); James Stephens (Ireland)
1883
• Robert Browning's
Jocoseria
• Emma Lazarus writes "
The New Colossus" in aid of the
Bartholdi Pedestal Fund (for the New York "Statue of Liberty")
• George Meredith's
Poems and Lyrics of the
Joy of Earth
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's
A Century of Roundels
• Ella (Wheeler) Wilcox's
Poems of Passion
1884
• Isabella Valency Crawford's Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's
Katie, and Other Poems
• Amy Levy's A Minor Poet and Other Verse
• Percy Montrose's "Oh My Darling Clementine"
• Mark Twain's The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn
Births
James Elroy Flecker;
Edith Alice Mary Harper, aka Anna Wickham;
John Collings Squire;
Francis Brett Young
1885
• Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's
Garden of Verses
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's Marino
Faliero
• Alfred lord Tennyson's Tiresias and Other
Poems, and "Balin and Balan"
1886
Births
Zoë Rumbold Akins (US);
William Rose Benêt (US);
Frances Cornford;
Hilda Doolittle (US);
John Gould Fletcher (US);
John Henry Gray;
Joyce Kilmer (US);
Siegfried Sassoon;
Charles Williams
1887
• Robert Browning's Parleyings with Certain People
• George Meredith's Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life
Births
Leonard Bacon (US);
Rupert Brooke; Elizabeth Daryush, daughter of Robert Bridges; Sir Julian Sorell Huxley;
John Robinson Jeffers (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Marianne Craig Moore (US); Edwin Muir (Scotland); Edith Louisa Sitwell; Sir Sacheverell Sitwell
1888
• Matthew Arnold's
Essays in Criticism,
second series
• Ernest Henley's
A Book of Verses
• George Meredith's
A Reading of Earth
• Ernest Lawrence Thayer's
"Casey at the Bat"
1889
• Robert Browning's
Asolando
• Eugene Field's
A Little Book of Western Verse,
including
"Little Boy Blue" and
"Wynkyn, Blynkyn and Nod"
• Amy Levy's
A London Plane Tree
• Walter Pater's
Appreciations: With an
Essay on Style
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's
Poems and
Ballads, 3rd series
• Alfred lord Tennyson's
Demeter and Other
Poems; he writes
"Crossing the Bar" in Oct.
as he crossed the Solent
• W. B. Yeats'
The Wanderings of Oisin
1890
• Emily Dickinson's poems published
posthumously
• Walter Pater's Appreciations with an Essay on Style
• Robert Louis Stevenson's Ballads
1891
• John Davidson's In a Music Hall
• William Morris's Poems by the Way
• The Rhymers Club gathered at the Cheshire
Cheese in Fleet Street, London, 1891-93, including
John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, W. B. Yeats, and others
• James Kenneth Stephen's Lapsus
Calami and Quo Musa Tendis
Deaths
John Henry Hopkins, Jr.;
James Russell Lowell;
Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton;
Herman Melville (US)
1892
• Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads,
including "Gunga Din"
• Alfred Tennyson's The Death of Oenone
1893
SUFFRAGE REFORM IN NEW ZEALAND
• Thomas Edward Brown's
Old John, and Other Poems
• John Davidson's
Fleet Street Eclogues
• Francis Thompson's
Poems, including
"The
Hound of Heaven"
Births
Gerald William Bullett; Arthur Stanley Bourinot (Canada); Richard Church;
Jorge Guillén (Spain); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Thomas MacGreevy (Ireland); Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols;
Wilfred Owen;
Dorothy Parker (US); Sir Herbert Edward Read; Ivor Armstrong Richards; Sylvia Townsend Warner
Deaths
Sarah Tittle Bolton;
Phillips Brooks;
Fanny Kemble;
Charles Sangster;
John Addington Symonds
1894
• Robert Browning's
Asolando
• John Davidson's
"Thirty Bob a Week"
•
Ben King's Verse (2nd edn., 1898)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's
Astrophel and Other
Poems
•
The Yellow Book, published
1894-97
• W. B. Yeats'
The Land of Heart's Desire
1895
Births
Capel Boake (Australia); Lilian Bowes-Lyon; Babette Deutsch (US);
Paul Eluard (France); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Robert Graves (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Robert Hillyer (US); David Michael Jones (Wales);
Charles Hamilton Sorley
1896
• Alfred Austin made British Poet Laureate
• Ernest Christopher Dowson's
Verses,
including
"Non Sum Qualis Eram"
• A. E. Housman's
A Shropshire Lad
• William Morris publishes the Kelmscott Press edition
of Chaucer's works
• Andrew Barton (`Banjo') Paterson's
The
Man from Snowy River
Births
Edmund Charles Blunden; Austin Clarke (Ireland); Nancy Cunard (US); Walter D'arcy Cresswell (New Zealand); Frederick Robert Higgins (Ireland)
Eugenio Montale (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1897
• Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Children
of the Night
Births
Louise Bogan (US);
Kenneth Burke (US);
William Faulkner (US)
1898
• Thomas Hardy's Wessex Poems
• Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol
1899
• Stephen Crane's War is Kind
• Ernest Dowson's Decorations: in Verse and Prose
• W. B. Yeats' The Wind among the Reeds
1900
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA PROCLAIMED JULY 9
•
Stephen Crane's
The Black Riders and Other Lines
• Ernest Henley's
For England's Sake
• Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch edits
The
Oxford Book of English Verse.
• W. B. Yeats'
The Shadowy Waters
Births
Basil Bunting;
Robert Desnos (France); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Richard A. W. Hughes (Wales);
Yvor Winters (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Giorgos Seferis (Greece); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Yvor Winters (US)
1901
EDWARD VII (-1910)
• Thomas Hardy's
Poems of the Past and Present
• a small plaque is set on the Statue of Liberty and holds
Emma Lazarus' poem, "
The New Colossus" (1883)
• George Meredith's
A Reading of Life
Births
Adrian Hanbury Bell; Ignatius Roy D. Campbell (South Africa);
Sterling Brown (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Salvatore Quasimodo (Italy); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Laura Riding Jackson (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Kenneth Slessor (Australia)
Deaths
Robert Williams Buchanan;
Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael;
William Ellery Channing;
William Cosmo Monkhouse;
Albery Allson Whitman
1902
• Thomas Hardy's
Poems of the Past and Present
• Walter De la Mare's
Songs of Childhood
• John Edward Masefield's
Salt-Water Ballads,
including "I must go down to the sea again"
• on June 2, Clara Butt sings a special version of
"
Land of Hope and Glory,"
the final chorus from the "Coronation Ode" composed by Edward Elgar
with lyrics by Arthur Christopher Benson
• W. B. Yeats'
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
Births
Arna Bontemps (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Kay Boyle (US); Kenneth Fearing;
Nazim Hikmet (Greece); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Langston Hughes (US);
Ogden Nash (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Michael William Edward Roberts; A. J. Smith (Canada);
Stevie Smith (Representative Poetry Online);
Deaths
Philip James Bailey; Aubrey Thomas De Vere; Thomas Dunn English; Lionel Pigot Johnson; Bret Harte;
William McGonagall (ca; Scotland); Albery A. Whitman;
Septimus Winner (Representative Poetry Online)
1903
ORVILLE AND WILBUR WRIGHT MAKE THE FIRST AIR FLIGHT
• Thomas Traherne's Poetical Works,
published posthumously.
• W. B. Yeats' Ideas of Good and Evil
Births
Countee Cullen (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Lorine Niedecker (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); William Charles Franklyn Plomer (South Africa); A. L. Rowse (Cornwall)
1904
• Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, I, followed by
II (1906) and III (1908)
• Christina Rossetti's Poetical Works,
edited by W. M. Rossetti
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's A Channel Passage,
and Other Poems
• W. B. Yeats' The King's Threshold and
The Hour-Glass
Births
Harold Acton; A. Alexandra Brown (Canada);
Earle Birney (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Arthur R. D. Fairburn (New Zealand); Cecil Day-Lewis;
Richard Eberhart (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Mary Elizabeth Frye;
Pablo Neruda (Chile); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Louis Zukovsky (US)
1905
ALBERT EINSTEIN PROPOSES HIS SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY
• Edmund Clerihew Bentley's
Biography
for Beginners and the invention of the clerihew
• Ernest Dowson's
Poems
• Duncan Campbell Scott's
"The Forsaken"
• Oscar Wilde's
De Profundis,
published posthumously
Births
Brian Coffey (Ireland); Idris Davies (Wales);
Frank Marshall Davis (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Geoffrey Grigson; Patrick Kavanagh (Ireland);
Stanley Kunitz (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Phyllis McGinley (Representative Poetry Online); Peter Quennel; Kenneth Rexroth (US); Rex Warner (Ireland);
Robert Penn Warren (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Deaths
Violet Fane;
John Hay;
George MacDonald
1906
• C. M. Doughty's The Dawn in Britain
• Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, II
• Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein
Births
Samuel Beckett;
John Betjeman, later Sir (Representative Poetry Online); Bruce Charles (Canada); William Empson, later Sir; Anne Lindbergh (US); Vernon Watkins (Wales);
Helen Bevington (Representative Poetry Online)
1907
1908
• John Davidson's
Mammon and his Message
•
Barbara Frietchie, a film directed by
J. Stuart Blackton (redone in 1915 and 1924) and based on the
story told by John Greenleaf Whittier in
the poem of the same name.
• Edith Nesbit's
Ballads & Lyrics of Socialism
• Ezra Pound's
A Lume Spento
Births
Julian Bell; Dennis Devlin (Ireland); Paul Engle (US);
Josephine Jacobsen (Canada); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
George Oppen (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Kathleen Jessie Raine;
Theodore Roethke (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Julian Bell (Representative Poetry Online)
Deaths
Ernest Fenollosa;
Alexander L. Posey;
James Ryder Randall;
Edmund Clarence Steadman
1909
• Andrew Cecil Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry
• Founding of the Poetry Recital Society (now the
Poetry Society)
• Thomas Hardy's Time's Laughingstocks
• George Meredith's Last Poems
• Ezra Pound's Personae
• Robert Service's Ballads of a Cheechako
• John Millington Synge's Poems and Translations
Births
Charles Brasch (New Zealand); John Glassco (Canada); Robert Garioch (Scotland);
A.M. Klein (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Dorothy Livesay (Canada);
Stephen Spender (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1910
GEORGE V (-1936)
• John Masefield's Ballads and Poems
• W. B. Yeats' Poems: Second Series
Births
Norman Alexander MacCaig (Scotland);
Charles Olson (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1911
• Britain establishes six copyright libraries (to which
copies of all books published in the country
must be sent): Bodleian Library (Oxford); British
Library (London); National Library of Scotland
(Edinburgh); National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth);
Trinity College (Dublin); and University Library
(Cambridge)
• Rupert Brooke's Poems 1911
• Ezra Pound's Canzoni
Births
Elizabeth Bishop (Representative Poetry Online);
J. V. Cunningham (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Allen Curnow (New Zealand); Robert W. V. Gittings; Paul Goodman (US) Sorley Maclean, aka Somhairle Macgill-Eain (Gailic);
Josephine Miles (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Czeslaw Milosz (Lithuania); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Kenneth Patchen (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Mervyn Laurence Peake
1912
•
Pauline Johnson's
Flint and Feather
• Sir Edward Marsh's anthology
Georgian
Poetry 1911-12
• H. E. Monro edits
The Poetry Review,
journal of the Poetry Recital Society
• Harriet Munroe founds
Poetry: A Magazine
of Verse in Chicago
• Ezra Pound's
Ripostes
• Robert Service's
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
Births
Kenneth Allott; Clement Byrne Christesen (Australia); Lawrence George Durrell; Roy Fuller; Christopher Vernon Hassall;
Irving Layton (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Charles Henry Madge; Frank Prince (South Africa); Anne Ridler;
May Sarton (Representative Poetry Online)
1913
• Robert Bridges made British Poet Laureate
• Robert Frost's A Boy's Will
• D. H. Lawrence's Love Poems
• Vachel Lindsay's General Booth Enters Heaven and Other Poems
• Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London
Deaths
Alfred Austin;
Edith Emma Cooper;
Pauline Johnson;
George Johnston (Canada);
Joaquin Miller
1914
WAR WORLD I BEGINS (JULY-SEPT.)
• Robert Frost's
North of Boston
• Thomas Hardy's
Satires of
Circumstance
•
Des Imagistes: An Anthology, edited
by Ezra Pound
• Joyce Kilmer's
Trees and Other Poems,
including "
Trees"
• Carl Sandburg publishes
"Chicago" in the magazine
Poetry
• W. B. Yeats'
Responsibilities
Births
John Berryman (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Clifford Dyment (Wales);
David Ignatow (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Randall Jarrell (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Weldon Kees (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Laurie Lee; Douglas Lepan (Canada);
Octavio Paz (Mexico) (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Henry Reed; Charles Hubert Sisson;
Dylan Thomas (Representative Poetry Online);
William Stafford (Representative Poetry Online)
1915
• Richard Aldington's
Images 1910-1915
• Rupert Brooke's
1914 & Other Poems
• Adelaide Crapsey's
Verse, and her
invention of the quintain, a five-line form
• T. S. Eliot's
"The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" published
in
Poetry (Chicago)
• Thomas Hardy publishes
"The Convergence of the Twain,"
on the sinking of the Titanic
• Edgar Lee Masters'
Spoon River Anthology
• Ezra Pound's
Cathay
• Edith Sitwell's
The Mother and Other Poems
Births
Mona Brand (Australia);
(Rupert) John Cornford (Representative Poetry Online); R. A. D. Ford (Canada); Isabella Stewart Gardner (US); Alun Lewis (Wales); Sydney Goodsir Smith (Scotland);
Ruth Stone (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Judith Wright (Australia)
1916
•
Hilda Doolittle's
Sea Garden ("H.D.")
• Robert Frost's
Mountain Interval,
including
"Out, Out--"
• D. H. Lawrence's
Amores
• Ezra Pound's
Lustra
• Carl Sandburg's
Chicago Poems
• Robert Service's
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man
• Charles Hamilton Sorley's
Marlborough
and Other Poems
Births
John Ciardi (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Gavin Buchanan Ewart; David Gascoyne;
Eve Merriam (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
P.K. Page (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
1917
UNITED STATES ENTERS WORLD WAR I
• Sarah Cleghorn's Portraits and Protest
• T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations
• Thomas Hardy's Moments of Vision
• D. H. Lawrence's Look! We have Come Through!
• Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascence and Other
Poems
• Poetry (Chicago) publishes
Ezra Pound's first three cantos
• Siegfried Sassoon's The Old Huntsman
• Edward Thomas's Poems
• W. B. Yeats' The Wild Swans at Coole
Births
Gwendolyn Brooks (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Charles Causley; Robert Conquest;
Ruth Herschberger (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Robert Lowell (Representative Poetry Online); James McAuley (Australia); Bertram Warr (Canada)
1918
• Rupert Brooke's
Collected Poems
• Gerard Manley Hopkins'
Poems,
edited by Robert Bridges
• James Joyce's
Exiles
• D. H. Lawrence's
New Poems
• Wilfred Owen composes
Dulce et Decorum Est
• Siegfried Sassoon's
Counter-Attack
• Edward Thomas'
Last Poems
• Arthur David Waley's
A Hundred and Seventy
Chinese Poems
• W. B. Yeats'
Per Amica Silentia Lunae
Awards
• Sara Teasdale's Love Songs (1917) wins
a special Pulitzer prize
Births
Margaret Avison (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Martin Bell;
Louis Dudek (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Anne Elder (New Zealand); William Sydney Graham (Scotland); John Heath-Stubbs; James Kirkup;
Al Purdy (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site);
William Jay Smith (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Muriel Spark (Scotland)
1919
TREATY OF VERSAILLES ENDS WORLD WAR I (JUNE 28)
• T. S. Eliot's
Poems
• Thomas Hardy's
Collected Poems
• Lieut.-Col.
John McCrae's
In Flanders Fields and Other Poems,
posthumously published
• Ezra Pound's
Quia Pauper Amavi
• Sigfried Sassoon's
War Poems
Awards
• Carl Sandburg's Cornhuskers (1918), awarded
a special Pulitzer prize
• Margaret Widdemer's Old Road to Paradise (1918)
wins a special Pulitzer prize
Births
Louise Simone Bennett, aka Louise Bennett-Coverley, aka "Miss Lou" (Jamaica); Ruth Dallas (New Zealand);
Madeline DeFrees (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Robert Duncan (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
William Meredith (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Jiri Orten (Czechoslovakia); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
May Swenson (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Deaths
Benjamin Paul Blood;
Wilfred Campbell;
Sarah Morgan Piatt;
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
1920
WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE ADOPTED IN THE UNITED STATES
• T. S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry
and Criticism and Poems
• Wilfred Owen's Poems, posthumously published
• Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
• Carl Sandburg's Smoke and Steel
• W. B. Yeats' Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Births
Charles Bukowski (US; Aug. 16); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Paul Celan (Romania); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Amy Clampitt (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Alex Comfort; Rosemary Dobson (Australia); Keith Castellain Douglas; Dennis Joseph Enright;
Barbara Guest (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Edwin Morgan (Scotland);
Howard Nemerov (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Alexander Scott (Scotland)
Deaths
Charles Edward Carryl;
Louise Imogen Guiney;
William Dean Howells;
Dollie Radford
1921
• Mrs. Dawson-Scott founds PEN, an
international Association of Poets,
Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and
Novelists
• T. S. Eliot's describes "dissociation of
sensibility" as a poetic splitting of emotion
from reason
• D. H. Lawrence's Tortoises
• Marianne Moore's Poems
• John Collings Squire's Collected
Parodies
Births
George Mackay Brown;
Hayden Carruth (Academy of American Poets Web site; US), James A. Emanuel (US), Chester Kallman (US);
Marie Ponsot (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Raymond Souster (Canada);
Mona Van Duyn (Representative Poetry Online);
Richard Wilbur (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1922
• T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
• Thomas Hardy's
Late Lyrics and Earlier
• James Weldon Johnson's
Book of American
Negro Poetry
• Claude McKay's
Harlem Shadows
• Marjorie Pickthall's
The Wood Carver's Wife,
including
"Marching Men"
• Carl Sandburg's
Slabs of the Sunburnt West
• Sir William Walton's composition,
Façade,
a musical setting of 21 poems by Edith Sitwell
• W. B. Yeats'
Later Poems
Awards
• Edwin Arlington Robinson's Collected Poems (1921)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Kingsley Amis (April 16); Elizabeth Brewster (Canada);
John Bruce (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Donald Davie; Douglas Grant Lochhead (Canada); A. L. Hendricks (Jamaica); Jack Kerouac (US); Sidney Arthur Kilworth Keyes;
Philip Larkin (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
John Gillespie Magee Jr. (US);
Jackson Mac Low (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Eli Mandel (Canada); Vernon Scannell
1923
• e. e. cummings'
Tulips and Chimneys
• Walter De La Mare's anthology
Come Hither: A
Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of all Ages
• D. H. Lawrence's
Birds, Beasts, and Flowers,
including "Snake"
• John Masefield's
Collected Poems
• Wallace Steven's
Harmonium,
including "
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird" and "
The Emperor of Ice-Cream"
• Jean Toomer's
Cane
• W. B. Yeats'
The Cat and the Moon,
including "Leda and the Swan"
Awards
• Edna St. Vincent Millay's The Ballad of the
Harp-weaver, A Few Figs (2nd edn.), and
Eight Sonnets, all published in 1922,
awarded the Pulitzer Prize this year
• Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to W. B. Yeats
1924
• John Masefield's Sard Harker
• A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young,
for children
• Marianne Moore's Observations
Awards
• Robert Frost's New Hampshire (1923)
awarded the Pulitzer Prize
• Vita Sackville-West's The Land,
winner of the Hawthornden Prize
Births
Claribel Alegría (Nicaragua); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Yehuda Amichai (Germany); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Elizabeth Bartlett; Patricia Beer;
Edgar Bowers (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Dennis Brutus (South Africa);
Jane Cooper (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Lauris Edmond (New Zealand); Nissim Ezekiel (India);
David Ferry (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Edward Field (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Janet Frame (New Zealand); Michael Hamburger
John Haines (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Zbigniew Herbert (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Lisel Mueller (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1925
• T. S. Eliot's Poems 1909-25,
including "The Hollow Men"
• Thomas Hardy's Human Shows
• Ezra Pound's A Draft of XVI Cantos
• W. B. Yeats' A Vision
Awards
• Edwin Arlington Robinson's The Man Who
Died Twice (1924), awarded the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Philip Booth (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Theodore Enslim (US); Ian Hamilton Finlay (Scotland);
Donald Justice (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Bob Kaufman (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Carolyn Kizer (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Kenneth Koch (Representative Poetry Online);
Maxine Kumin (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Gerald Stern (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); John Wain (March 14); Francis Webb (Australia)
1926
• Langston Hughes'
The Weary Blues,
including "
The Weary Blues"
• Hugh MacDiarmid's
A Drunk Man Looks at the
Thistle
• Archibald MacLeish's
Streets in the Moon,
including "The End of the World"
• Dorothy Parker's
Enough Rope
• Ezra Pound's
Personae
Awards
• Amy Lowell's What's O'Clock (1925) wins the
Pulitzer Prize
Deaths
Ada Cambridge; Charles Montagu Doughty;
Perceval Gibbon (South Africa); Eva Selena Gore-Booth;
Rainer Maria Rilke, (Dec. 29), of leukemia; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Francis Joseph Sherman
1927
• Gilbert Keith Chesterton's Collected Poems
• T. S. Eliot's "The Journey of the Magi"
• James Weldon Johnson's God's Promises
• James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach
• J. L. Lowes' The Road to Xanadu, a
book on the composition of S. T. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"
• Don Marquis' archie and mehitabel, a
collection of vers libre poems typed by a former-poet-turned-cockroach
by jumping on the keys of a typewriter
• A. A. Milne's Now We are Six
• W. B. Yeats' October Blast, including
"Among School Children"
Awards
• Leonora Speyer's Fiddler's Farewell (1926)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
John Ashbery (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Martin Carter (Guyana); Henry Coulette (US);
David Diop (France); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Larry Eigner (US);
Galway Kinnell (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
W. S. Merwin (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Richard Murphy (Ireland); Charles Tomlinson; Phyllis Webb (Canada);
James Wright (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Deaths
Emma Marie Caillard;
Charles Mair
1928
• T. S. Eliot's For Lancelot Andrewes
• Thomas Hardy's Winter Words
• Carl Sandburg's Good Morning America
• Allen Tate's Mr. Pope and Other Poems,
including "Ode to the Confederate Dead"
• W. B. Yeats' The Tower
Awards
• Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tristram (1927)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Maya Angelou, aka Marguerite Annie Johnson (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Bruce Beaver (Australia); Carol Bergé (US); R. F. Brissenden (Australia);
Don Coles (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Peter Davison (US);
Irving Feldman (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Donald Hall (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Thomas Kinsella (Ireland);
Philip Levine (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Anne Sexton (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Alan Sillitoe; Iain Crichton Smith (Scotland); James Wright (US)
1929
• Robert Bridges' The Testament of Beauty
• Cecil Day-Lewis' Transitional Poem
• D. H. Lawrence's Pansies
• I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism: A
Study in Literary Judgement
• W. B. Yeats' The Winding Stair
Awards
• Stephen Vincent Benét's John Brown's
Body (1928) wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Anne Ellen Beresford; Edward Dorn (US); Ursula A. Fanthorpe;
Thom Gunn (UK); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
John Hollander (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Richard Howard (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
X. J. Kennedy (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); John Patrick Montague;
Ned O'Gorman (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Peter Porter;
Adrienne Rich (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Peter Dale Scott (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
1930
• W. H. Auden's Poems
• Samuel Beckett's Whoroscope
• Hart Crane's The Bridge
• T. S. Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday"
• William Empson's Seven Types of
Ambiguity, a book of criticism
• John Masefield made British Poet Laureate
Awards
• Conrad Aitken's Selected Poems (1929)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Chinua Achebe (Nigeria);
Adonis (Academy of American Poets; Syria);
Edward Brathwaite (Barbados); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Gregory N. Corso (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Roy Fisher;
Ted Hughes (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Mazisi Kunene (South Africa); Jon Silkin;
Gary Snyder (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Anthony Thwaite;
Derek Walcott (West Indies); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1931
• John Betjeman's Mount Zion
• Edmund Blunden publishes Wilfred Owen's poems
Awards
• Robert Frost's Collected Poems (1930)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
P'Bitek (East Africa); Alan Charles Brownjohn;
Sonja Dunn (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Ruth Fainlight;
Etheridge Knight (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Peter Levi; Jay Macpherson (Canada); Adrienne Rich (US); Peter Chad Tigar
Tomas Tranströmer (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Judith Viorst (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1932
• W. H. Auden's The Orators
• Sterling Brown's Southern Road
• T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes
and Selected Essays
• Thomas Hardy's Collected Poems
• Sir Julian Sorell Huxley's The Captive
Shrew and other Poems of a Biologist
• F. R. Leavis' New Bearings in English Poetry
attacks late Victorian and Georgian poetry and praises
Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and other modernists
• W. B. Yeats' Words for Music Perhaps
Awards
• George Dillon's The Flowering Stone
(1931) wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Patrick Cullinan (South Africa);
Geoffrey Hill (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Jenny Joseph; Douglas Livingstone (South Africa); George Mann MacBeth (Jan. 19); Michael McClure (US); Adrian Mitchell; Christopher Okigbo (Nigeria);
Linda Pastan (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Sylvia Plath (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Peter William Redgrove
John Updike (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Linda M. Stitt (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
1933
• W. H. Auden's The Dance of Death
• Cecil Day-Lewis' The Magnetic
Mountain
• T. S. Eliot's The Use of Poetry and
the Use of Criticism
• Gregory Grigson founds New Verse
(1933-39)
• A. E. Housman's Leslie Stephen Lecture at
Cambridge, "The Name and Nature of Poetry"
• D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems
• Stephen Spender's Poems
• W. B. Yeats' Collected Poems
Awards
• Archibald MacLeish's Conquistador
(1932) wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Gerald William Barrax (US); Maureen Duffy; Kevin Ireland (New Zealand); John Edward Mackenzie Lucie-Smith (Jamaica); Alden Nowlan (Canada);
Joe Rosenblatt (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Anne Stevenson;
Robert Sward (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
1934
• The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a film
directed by Sidney Franklin, with Norman Shearer as Elizabeth
Barrett and Fredric March as Robert Browning; redone in
1957, less successfully
• T. S. Eliot's The Rock
• Dylan Thomas' Eighteen Poems,
including "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"
• William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems
• W. B. Yeats' The King of the Great Clock
Tower
Awards
• Robert Hillyer's Collected Verse (1933)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
• Laurence Whistler wins the King's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
Births
Fleur Adock;
Jack Agüeros (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Amiri Baraka (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Ted Berrigan (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Wendell Berry (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Leonard Cohen (Canada); Kamala Das (India); Diane Di Prima (US);
Henry Dumas (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
M. Travis Lane (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Everett Le Roi Jones, aka Amiri Baraka;
Hettie Jones (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Audre Lorde (Representative Poetry Online); David Malouf (Australia);
Walt McDonald (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
N. Scott Momaday (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Sonia Sanchez (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Wole Soyinka (Nigeria);
Mark Strand (Representative Poetry Online)
Deaths
Jean Blewett; John Henry Gray;
Dion Titherage (Representative Poetry Online)
1935
• T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral
• William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral
• George Gershwin's musical Porgy and Bess
• Louis MacNeice's Poems
• John Masefield's Box of Delights
• Wallace Stevens' Ideas of Order
• W. B. Yeats' A Full Moon in March
Awards
• Audrey Wurdemann's Bright Ambush (1934)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
Deaths
Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Helena Mabel Forrest;
Fernando Pessoa, (Nov. 30), of cirrhosis of the liver; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Lizette Woodworth Reese;
Edwin Arlington Robinson; George William Russell; Sir William Watson
1936
EDWARD VIII (-1936); GEORGE VI (-1952)
• W. H. Auden's Look, Stranger!
• T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems 1909-35,
including Burnet Norton
• James Laughlin founds New Directions Press New York),
which published many modern poets for the first time
• F. R. Leavis's Revaluation rejects
Milton, Spenser, and Shelley and praises Donne,
Pope, Hopkins, Eliot, and others
• Dorothy Parker's Not So Deep as a Well
• Michael Roberts edits The Faber Book of Modern
Verse, which praises poets such as W. H. Auden and
T. S. Eliot and ignores poets like Robert Frost and Thomas
Hardy
• Dylan Thomas' Twenty-Five Poems,
including "And Death Shall have No Dominion"
• W. B. Yeats edits The Oxford Book of Modern
Verse
Awards
• W. H. Auden wins the King's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Robert Coffin's Strange Holiness (1935)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
1937
• John Betjeman's Continual Dew,
including "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan
Hotel"
• Iowa Writers' Workshop founded by Paul Engle
at the University of Iowa
• David Jones' In Parenthesis
• Isaac Rosenberg's Collected Works,
posthumously published
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
• the United States unofficially appoints Poet Laureates
(as Poetry Consultants to the Library of Congress)
Awards
• Robert Frost's A Further Range (1936)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
• Edwin Markham wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
1938
• Louis MacNeice's The Earth Compels
• Understanding Poetry, edited by
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren (appearing
thereafter in revised editions to 1976)
• W. B. Yeats' New Poems,
including "Lapis Lazuli"
Awards
• Marya Zaturenska's Cold Morning Sky
(1937) wins the Pulitzer Prize
Births
Michael Harper (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Tony Harrison; Frances Horovitz; Keroapetse Kgositsile (South Africa); Deena Linett (US);
Leslie Allan Murray (Academy of American Poets Web site; Australia);
John Newlove (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site);
Ishmael Reed (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Charles Simic (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
George Thaniel (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
1939
AUSTRALIA, GREAT BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND NEW ZEALAND DECLARE WAR ON GERMANY (SEPT. 3)
• T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book
of Practical Cats
• Gunga Din, a film directed by
George Stevens, based loosely on Rudyard Kipling's
poem of the same name
• Poetry London, a magazine
founded by Dylan Thomas, its editor James
Meary Tambimuttu, and others
• Dylan Thomas's The Map of Love
• Christopher Smart's Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song
from Bedlam, posthumously edited by W. F. Stead
• W. B. Yeats' Last Poems and Two Plays
Awards
• John Gould Fletcher's Selected
Poems (1938) wins the Pulitzer Prize
1940
• W. H. Auden's Another Time
• Sir John Betjeman's Old Lights for New Chancels
• T. S. Eliot's East Coker, published
in New English Weekly
• Dylan Thomas' Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Dog
Awards
• Michael Thwaites wins the King's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Mark Van Doren's Collected Poems
(1939) wins the Pulitzer Prize
1941
JAPAN ATTACKS PEARL HARBOR (NOV. 27)
• W. H. Auden's
New Year Letters (or
The Double Man)
• T. S. Eliot's
The Dry Salvages, published
in
New English Weekly
• On September 3, 19-year-old John Gillespie Magee, Jr.,
flew a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V and afterwards wrote
"
High Flight" about the experience
• John Crowe Ransom's
The New Criticism
Awards
• Leonard Bacon's Sunderland Capture
(1940) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 5)
1942
• Earle Birney's David and Other Poems
• Walter De la Mare's Collected Poems
• T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding, published
in New English Weekly
• Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger
• Alun Lewis' Raiders' Dawn,
on a soldier's life in the World War II
Awards
• William Rose Benét's The Dust Which is
God (1941) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 4)
Births
Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana);
Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Mark DeFoe (US); Douglas Eaglesham Dunn (Scotland);
Jennifer Footman (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site);
Marilyn Hacker (Representative Poetry Online); David Henderson (US);
Haki Madhubuti (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
William Matthews (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Pat Mora (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Arthur Nortje (South Africa);
Sharon Olds (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Henry Taylor (US); Hugo Williams
1943
• Rodgers and Hammerstein's US musical
Oklahoma
• Dylan Thomas's New Poems
Awards
• Robert Frost's A Witness Tree (1942) wins
the Pulitzer Prize (May 3)
1944
• W. H. Auden's For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio
• Sir John Betjeman's New Bats in Old Belfries
• Walter De la Mare's Collected Rhymes and Verses
• H. D.'s (Hilda Dolittle's) Trilogy (1944-46),
on war-time London
• T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets
Awards
• Stephen Vincent Benét's Western
Star posthumously (1943) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 1)
• Edith Henrich of Williams Bay, Wisconsin,
wins the first prize of the Poetry Society of America (Jan. 2)
1945
THE UNITED STATES DROPS ATOMIC BOMBS ON HIROSHIMA (AUG. 6)
AND NAGASAKI (AUG. 9)
• Louise Bogen holds the Library of Congress Chair of
Poetry (1945-46)
• Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, based
on George Crabbe's The Borough
• Randall Jarrell's Little Friend, Little Friend,
including "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
• Alun Lewis's Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets,
posthumously published
• Ezra Pound is arrested for treason at Genoa and
imprisoned at Pisa by the US army
Awards
• W. H. Auden wins the American Academy of Arts and
Letters poetry prize (March 28)
• Karl Shapiro's V-Letter and Other
Poems (1944) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 7)
Deaths
Maurice Baring; Mary Ursula Bethell; Capel Boake;
Robert Desnos (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas;
Paul Valéry (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Charles Williams
1946
• W. H. Auden becomes a US citizen
• Roy Campbell's Talking Bronco
• Walter De la Mare's The Traveller
• Henry Reed's A Map of Verona,
including "Naming of Parts"
• Dylan Thomas' Deaths and Entrances,
including "Fern Hill" and "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a
Child in London"
• William Carlos Williams' Paterson
(1946-58)
Awards
• Ralph Hodgson wins the National Institute of Arts and Letters
Award for Distinguished Achievement to a foreign poet in the US (April 29)
• Pulitzer Prize for poetry goes unawarded this year
• Ridgely Torrance wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Countee Cullen (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Ernest Rhys;
Gertrude Stein, (July 27), of cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1947
• Richard Eberhart's Burr Oaks,
including "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment"
• Paul Hiebert's Sara Binks,
"the sweet songstess of Saskatchewan"
• Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter
• Louis MacNeice's The Dark Tower
• Stephen Spender's Poems of Dedication
Awards
• Robert Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle
(1946) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 5)
Deaths
Richard Le Gallienne;
Duncan Campbell Scott;
Anna Wickham
1948
• Sir John Betjeman's Selected Poems
• Bollingen Prize for Poetry is established
• Robert Graves' The White Goddess,
a "historical grammar" of poetic myth and inspiration
• Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos
Awards
• W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety (1947)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 3)
• Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to T. S. Eliot (Nov. 4)
• Percy MacKaye wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Gordon Bottomley;
Albert Goldbarth (US);
Claude McKay;
Michael William Edward Roberts
1949
• Judith Wright's Woman to Man
Awards
• Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos wins
the Bollingen Prize (Feb. 19)
• Peter Viereck's Terror and Decorum
(1948) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 2)
Births
John Agard (Guyana);
Agha Shahid Ali (India; Academy of American Poets Web site); Michael Blumenthal (US);
David Bottoms (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Marilyn Bowering (Canada); Olga Broumas (US);
Ralph Burns (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Pier Giorgio di Cicco (Canada; Representative Poetry Online);
Victor Hernandez Cruz (Puerto Rico; Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Bei Dao (China; Academy of American Poets Web site);
Lynn Emanuel (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Alice Major (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Mary di Michele (Canada);
Barbara Ras (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Liam Rector (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Christopher Reid (Ireland);
David St. John (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Robyn Sarah (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site);
Jane Urquhart (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site);
Eliot Weinberger (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
C. D. Wright (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
The Beat Generation 1950-1970
1950
• W. H. Auden's Collected Shorter Poems
1930-1944
• Ezra Pound's Seventy Cantos
Awards
• The Bollingen Prize for poetry is transferred
to Yale University Library because of controversy
over the award of the prize last year to Ezra Pound
• Gwendolyn Brooks' Annie Allen (1949)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 1)
• e. e. cummings wins the annual Fellowship of the Academy
of American Poets (Dec. 7)
• Wallace Stevens, at 70, wins the Bollingen Prize for
his entire body of work (March 27)
• William Carlos Williams wins the National Book Award for
poetry for his Paterson, Book III, and Selected Poems
1951
• W. H. Auden's Nones
• Bad Lord Byron, a film
directed by David Macdonald about the Romantic poet
• Peter Mason Opie and Iona Margaret
Balfour Opie publish The Oxford
Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes
Awards
• Carl Sandburg's Complete Poems (1950)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 7)
• John Crowe Ransom wins the Bollingen Prize
for his entire body of work (Jan. 22)
• Wallace Stevens wins the National Book Award
for poetry for The Auroras of Autumn (March 6)
1952
ELIZABETH I
• "concrete poetry," a phrase invented in Brazil
• David Jones' The Anathemata
• Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems 1934-52,
including "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night"
Awards
• Padraic Colum wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Marianne Moore's Collected Poems
(1951) wins the Bollingen Prize (Jan. 11) and the National
Book Award for poetry (Jan. 29)
• Andrew Young wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
1953
FRANCIS CRICK AND JAMES D. WATSON DISCOVER THE STRUCTURE OF DNA
• Sir John Betjeman's A Few Late
Chrysanthemums
• Louis MacNeice's Autumn Sequel
• Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring
and The Lord of the Rings
• Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the
Republic of Liberia
Awards
• Elizabeth Bishop wins the Shelley Memorial Award of the
Poetry Society of America (Jan. 5)
• Padraic Colum wins the Gregory Medal of the Irish
Academy of Letters (May 23)
• Robert Frost wins the fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (March 3)
• Oliver St. John Gogarty, of Ireland, wins the
Gold Medal for Service to Poetry from the Poetry Society
of America (Jan. 13)
• Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems
(1952) wins the Bollingen Prize (Jan. 10), the National Book
Award for poetry (Jan. 27), and the Pulitzer Prize (May 4)
• Marianne Moore wins the Gold Medal of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters (May 27)
• Carl Sandburg wins the Gold Medal for Distinguished
Achievement from the Poetry Society of America (Jan. 13)
• Arthur Waley wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
Deaths
Hilaire Belloc, at 82 (July 6); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) from burns resulting from a fall into a fireplace; Helena Jane Coleman; George Herbert Clarke; Idris Davies;
Eugene O'Neill;
Dylan Thomas (Representative Poetry Online)
1954
• W. H. Auden's The Shield of Achilles
• Sir John Betjeman's A Few Late
Chrysanthemums
• Robert Creeley founds and edits the Black Mountain Review
• Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived
• Frank Prince's Soldiers Bathing and
Other Poems
• Jon Silkin's The Peaceable Kingdom,
including "Death of a Son (who died in a mental hospital
aged one)"
• Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood
is broadcast on radio on January 25
• Tolkien's The Return of the King
Awards
• Oliver St. John Gogarty and Louise Townsend Nicholl win
the fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (Jan. 28)
• W. H. Auden wins the Bollingen Prize (Jan. 10)
• Ernest Hemingway wins the Nobel Prize (Oct. 28)
• Theodore Roethke's The Waking: Poems, 1933-53 (1953)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 3)
Deaths
Leonard Bacon, at 66 (Jan. 1);
Maxwell Bodenheim;
Francis Brett Young
1955
• William Sydney Graham's The Nightfishing
Awards
• Leonie Adams, for Poems; a Selection, and
Louise Bogen, for Collected Poems 1922-53, jointly win
the Bollingen Prize
• e. e. cummings wins the National Book Award for poetry
for Poems: 1923-1954
• Robert Fitzgerald wins the Shelley Memorial Award
of the Poetry Society of America (May 16)
• Rolfe Humphries wins the American Academy of Poets
fellowship (Dec. 29)
• Ruth Pitter wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems (1954)
wins the Pulitzer Prize
1956
• John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
• Alan Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, a signature
of the Beat Generation
• Ted Hughes and Silvia Plath marry
• Anne Lindbergh's The Unicorn, and Other Poems
• Rock and roll music begins
Awards
• Edmund Blunden wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Elizabeth Bishop's Poems -- North & South /
A Cold Spring (1955) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 7)
• William Carlos Williams wins the Fellowship of the
American Academy of Poets (Dec. 28)
Deaths
Edmund Clerihew Bentley, at 80 (Mar. 30);
Walter De la Mare, at 83 (June 22);
A. A. Milne, at 74 (Jan. 31);
Percy MacKaye, at 81 (Aug. 31);
Dorothy Wellesley
1957
• T. S. Eliot's On Poetry and Poets
• Ted Hughes' The Hawk in the Rain, including
"The Thought Fox"
• Jay Macpherson's The Boatman
• Ogden Nash's You Can't Get There from Here
• Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning
Awards
• Conrad Aiken wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Siegfried Sassoon wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Allen Tate wins the Bollingen Prize for his life works
(Jan. 13)
• Richard Wilbur's Things of this World
wins the Pulitzer Prize for 1957 (May 6) as well as
the National Book Award (March 13)
Deaths
Joseph Warren Beach; Ignatius Roy D. Campbell (South Africa); Charles Badger Clark; Arthur R. D. Fairburn; Merrill Moore, at 54 (Sept. 20); Christopher Morley, at 66 (March 28); Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty, at 79 (Sept. 22), of a heart attack;
Rose Fyleman (Representative Poetry Online)
1958
• Chief Justice Bolitha J. Laws in the U.S. District
Court, Washington, D.C., dismisses treason charges against
Ezra Pound (April 18) after psychologists declare him insane
• John Betjeman's Collected Poems
• Brazilian manifesto for concrete poetry, which focuses
on visual and other sensory qualities
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind
Awards
• Robinson Jeffers wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• James Reaney's A Suit of Nettles,
imitating Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar,
wins the Governor General's award in Canada
• Robert Penn Warren's Promises: Poems
1954-1956 (1956) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 5)
Deaths
Zoë Rumbold Akins, at 72 (Oct. 29);
Gerald William Bullett, at 64 (Jan. 3);
James Branch Cabell, at 79 (May 5);
Roy Campbell;
Alfred Noyes, (June 25); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Robert W. Service, at 84 (Sept. 11);
John Collings Squire
1959
• John Berryman's Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet
• Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish, written about
his mentally-ill mother
• Kenneth Koch's Ko, or a Season on Earth
• Irving Layton's A Red Carpet for the Sun
• Robert Lowell's Life Studies
Awards
•
Louise Bogan and Leonie Adams wins the Fellowship of the American
Academy of Poets (Nov. 4)
• Frances Cornford wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Donald B. Justice wins the Lamont Poetry Selection (Nov. 4)
• Stanley Kunitz's
Selected Poems 1918-1958
(1958) wins the Pulitzer Prize for 1959 (May 4)
• Theodore Roethke wins the National Book Award
for
Words for the Wind (March 3)
Deaths
Sarah Cleghorn, at 83 (April 4);
Dennis Devlin;
Edgar Albert Guest, at 77 (Aug. 5), known as
the "poet of the people";
Luis Palés Matos, of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Edwin Muir, at 70 (Jan. 3);
Alfred Noyes
Carl Phillips (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1960
• W. H. Auden's Homage to Clio
• Sir John Betjeman's Summoned by Bells
• Ted Hughes' Lupercal
• Sylvia Plath's The Colossus
Awards
• John Betjeman wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Delmore Schwartz wins the Bollingen Prize for
Summer Knowledge (Jan. 10)
• W. D. Snodgrass's
Heart's Needle (1959)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 2)
• Jesse Stuart wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Demetria Martinez (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1961
• Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains
• LeRoi Jones' Preface to a Twenty Volume
Suicide Note
Awards
• Robert Fitzgerald wins the Bollingen Translation
Prize for his Homer's Odyssey (Oct. 31), the
first time it is awarded
• Horace V. Gregory wins the Fellowship of the
American Academy of Poets (Nov. 15)
• Randall Jarrell wins the National Book Award
for The Woman at the Washington Zoo (March 14)
• Phyllis McGinley's Times Three:
Selected Verse from Three Decades (1960) wins the
Pulitzer Prize (May 1)
• Yvor Winters wins the Bollingen Prize for
his Collected Poems (Jan. 8)
1962
• the Beatles (1962-70)
• Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, including settings
for Wilfred Owen's poems
• Robert Frost's In the Clearing
• Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains
• Kenneth Koch's Thank You
• Anne Sexton's All my Pretty Ones,
including "The Truth the Dead Know"
Awards
• Alan Dugan's Poems (1961) wins
the Pulitzer Prize (May 7) and the National Book
Award (March 13)
• Richard Eberhart, for his life work, and
John Hall Wheelock, for The Garden and Other Poems,
jointly win the Bollingen Prize (Jan. 7)
• Edward Field wins the American Academy of Poets
Lamont Poetry Selection for "Stand Up Friend, with me" (Nov. 13)
• Christopher Fry wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Richard Lattimore's The Frogs, from Aristophanes,
and Robert Lowell's Imitations, jointly win the
Bollingen Translation Prize (Nov. 13)
• John Crowe Ransom wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Richard Aldington;
e. e. cummings, at 67 (Sept. 3), of a stroke;
William Faulkner, at 64 (July 6), of a heart attack;
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson;
Mary Gilmore;
Ralph Edwin Hodgson;
John Robinson Jeffers (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1963
• Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith
edit A Group Anthology
• Silvia Plath's The Bell Jar, an
autobiographical novel published
under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas
• The Raven, a film directed
by Roger Corman, starring Vincent Price, and loosely
based on Edgar Allan Poe's poem of the same name
Awards
• William C. Plomer wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Ezra Pound and Allen Tate win the American Academy of Poets
Fellowship (Sept. 4)
• William Stafford wins the National Book Award
for Traveling through the Dark (March 12)
• William Carlos Williams' Pictures from
Brueghel (1962) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 6), and he
wins the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal (May 22)
1964
• Sir John Betjeman's Ring of Bells
• Leonard Cohen's Flowers for Hitler,
including "The Only Tourist in Havana Turns his
Thoughts Homeward"
• Philip Larkin's Whitsun Weddings
• Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead
Awards
• Elizabeth Bishop wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• John Crowe Ransom wins the National Book Award
for Selected Poems (March 10)
• Louis Simpson's At the End of the
Open Road (1963) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 4)
• Rev. Ronald S. Thomas wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
Deaths
Clive Bell; Zora Cross;
E.J. Pratt (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site), at 81 (April 26); Edith Sitwell, at 77 (Dec. 9), of a heart attack
1965
• Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited
• Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist
• Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings
• Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including
"Daddy," published posthumously
• Jon Silkin's Nature with Man
• Meic Stephens founds Poetry Wales
• Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery
Awards
• John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs (1964) wins
the Pulitzer Prize (May 3)
• Richard Dickey's Buckdancer's Choice wins the
National Book Award for Poetry
• Philip Larkin wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Marianne Moore wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Theodore Roethke posthumously wins the National Book
Award for The Far Field (March 9)
Deaths
Joseph Auslander, at 67 (June 22), of a heart attack;
Richard Blackmur, at 61 (Feb. 2);
Nancy Cunard;
T. S. Eliot, at 76 (Jan. 4);
Eleanor Farjeon;
Randall Jarrell, at 51 (Oct. 14), in a highway accident; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Timothy Liu (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1966
• Basil Bunting's Briggflatts
• James Dickey serves as poetry consultant
to the Library of Congress, 1966-68
• Josephine Jacobsen's The Animal Inside
• LeRoi Jones' Black Art
• Raymond Souster founds the League of
Canadian Poets
• Anthony Thwaite and John Hollander publish
the first anthology of double dactyls, Jiggery Pokery
Awards
• Richard Eberhart's Selected Poems 1930-65
(1965) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 2)
• Archibald MacLeish and John Berryman win the Academy of
American Poets Fellowship
• William Meredith wins the National Institute of Arts and Letters
Loines Award for poetry (March 23)
Deaths
Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Berton Braley, at 83 (Jan. 23); Raymond Duncan, at 91 (Aug. 14); Georgia Douglas Johnson, at 86 (May 14), of a stroke; Alfred Kreymborg, at 82 (Aug. 14);
Mina Loy (Representative Poetry Online);
Frank O'Hara (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); W. W. E. Ross;
Delmore Schwartz, at 52 (July 11), of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Melvin Tolson; Henry Treese, at 55 (June 10); Arthur David Waley
1967
• Margaret Atwood's The Circle Game
• the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely
Hearts' Club Band (recording)
• C. Day-Lewis made British Poet Laureate
• Ted Hughes' Wodwo
• the Liverpool poets: Adrian Henri, Roger
McGough, and Brian Patten
• Wole Soyinka's Idanre, and Other Poems
Awards
• A. R. Ammons wins the Fellowship of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters (May 24)
• Charles Causley wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• James Merrill wins the National Book Award for
Nights and Days (March 8)
• Anne Sexton's Live or Die, to win
the Pulitzer Prize for 1967 (May 1)
• Mark Van Doren wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Robert Penn Warren wins the Bollingen Prize for his Selected
Poems (Feb. 5)
Deaths
David C. DeJong, at 62 (Sept. 5);
Langston Hughes, at 65 (May 22), of heart failure; Patrick Kavanagh, at 62 (Nov. 30), of pneumonia; Margaret Larkin, at 67 (May 8);
John Masefield (Representative Poetry Online); Thomas MacGreevy; Christopher Okigko;
Dorothy Parker, at 73 (June 7), of a heart attack;
V. Penelope Pelizzon (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Carl Sandburg, at 89 (July 22), of a heart attack; Siegfried Sassoon, at 80 (Sept. 1); Odel Shepard, at 82 (July 19);
Jean Toomer (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Vernon Watkins
1968
• Cecil Day-Lewis is named British Poet Laureate (Jan. 1)
• LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal co-edit Black
Fire, an anthology of African-American poetry
Awards
• W. H. Auden wins the gold medal of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters (May 28)
• Robert Bly's The Light around my Body wins
the National Book Award (March 6)
• Gwendolyn Brooks succeeds Carl Sandburg as Poet
Laureate of Illinois
• Robert Graves wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours
(1967) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 6) and he also wins
the Loines Award (May 28)
• Stanley Kunitz wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Births
Nan Cohen (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Michael Teig (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Deaths
Witter Bynner, at 86 (June 1);
Donald Davidson, at 74 (April 26);
George Hill Dillon, at 62 (May 9);
Mervyn Laurence Peake;
Salvatore Quasimodo, (June 14); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Sir Herbert Edward Read, at 74 (June 12);
Winfield Townley Scott, at 58 (April 28);
David Stacton, at 42 (Jan. 20);
Yvor Winters, at 67 (Jan. 25); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1969
MOON-WALK and the ARPANET
• W. H. Auden's City without Walls
• Sir Arthur Bliss' cantata The world
is charged with the grandeur of God, from
Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet of the same first line
• Louise Bogan publishes The Blue Estuaries
and retires after 38 years as poetry critic for The New Yorker
(Dec.)
• Lucille Clifton's Good Times,
selected as one of the year's best books by The
New York Times
• Donald Davies' Essex Poems
• Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark
• LeRoi Jones's Black Magic: Poetry, 1961-1967
• Wole Soyinka's Poems from Prison
Awards
• Samuel Beckett awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature
• Richard Eberhart and Anthony Hecht win the fellowship of the
American Academy of Poets (Feb. 13)
• George Oppen's Of Being Numerous
(1968) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 5)
• Karl Shapiro's Selected Poems and John
Berryman's His Toy, His Dream, His Rest win the
Bollingen Prize (Jan. 5), and Berryman also wins
the National Book Award for his book (March 10)
• Stevie Smith wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
Deaths
Floyd Bell, at 82 (July 23), of a heart ailment;
Charles Edison, aka Tom Sleeper, at 78 (July 31), of heart failure;
Rolfe Humphries, at 74 (April 22), of emphysema;
Sir Osbert Sitwell, at 76 (May 4), of a heart attack
1970
• Margaret Atwood's The Journals of
Susanna Moodie
• Noël Coward knighted
• Ted Hughes' Crow
• LeRoi Jones' It's Nation Time
• Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of
Billy the Kid
• Ezra Pound's Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX
to CXVII
• Henry Reed's "The Naiming of Parts," published in
his The Lessons of War
• Tomfoolery, an animated film directed
by Joy Batchelor and John Halas, based on the nonsense
verse of Edward Lear (especially "The Courtship of the
Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo") and Lewis Carroll
Awards
• Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems wins the
National Book Award (March 2)
• Roy Fuller wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Richard Howard's Untitled Subjects
(1969) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 4)
• Howard Nemerov wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Louise Bogan, at 72 (Feb. 4);
Paul Celan (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Mary Phelps Crosby; Edsel Ford, at 41 (Feb. 19);
Lorine Niedecker (Dec 31); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Arthur Nortje;
Charles Olson, of cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); John Dos Passos
1971
• Dick Allen's Anon and Various Time Machine Poems
• Maya Angelou's Just Give Me a Cool
Glass of Water 'Fore I Diie
• The Canterbury Tales, a film directed
by Pier Paulo Pasolini, providing a soft-pornographic,
controversial version of four tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• Josephine Jacobsen is named Poetry Consultant
to the Library of Congress
• Right On!, a film directed by Herbert
Danska, of poetry recitations with bongo accompaniments
on New York city streets (April 8)
Awards
• Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns wins
a Whitbread Literary award
• W. S. Merwin's The Carrier of Ladders
(1970) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 3)
• Stephen Spender wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Richard P. Wilbur's Walking to Sleep and
Mona Van Duyn's To See, To Take win the Bollingen
Prize (Jan. 10); and Van Duyn also wins the National Book
Award for her book (March 2)
• James Wright wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Clifford Dyment; Lenore G. Marshall, at 72 (Sept. 9); Ogden Nash, at 68 (May 19);
Giorgos Seferis (Sept. 21); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Stevie Smith (Representative Poetry Online); Alexander Young
1972
• Sir John Betjeman made British Poet Laureate (Oct. 10)
• LeRoi Jones' Spirit Reach (as Amiri
Imamu Baraka, a Black Muslim)
• Mervyn Laurence Peake's A Book of Nonsense
• Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt
Awards
• Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems and Howard
Moss's Selected Poems win the National Book Award
(April 11)
• W. D. Snodgrass wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• James Wright's Collected Poems (1971) wins
the Pulitzer Prize (May 1)
Deaths
James K. Baxter;
John Berryman, at 57 (Jan. 7), of suicide (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Padraic Colum, at 90 (Jan. 11); Cecil Day-Lewis, at 68 (May 22); Eileen Duggan; Robert Fletcher, at 87 (Nov. 20), poet of "Don't Fence Me In"; Paul Goodman, of a heart attack (US);
A.M. Klein (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site), at 63 (Aug. 21);
Marianne Craig Moore, at 84 (Feb. 5);
Kenneth Patchen, at 60 (Jan. 8), of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Ezra Pound, at 87 (Nov. 1), of an intestinal blockage; Gladys Schmitt, 63 (Oct. 3); Mark Van Doren, 78 (Dec. 10); Andrew John Young
1973
• Derek Walcott's Another Life
Awards
• A. R. Ammons's Collected Poems wins
the National Book Award (April 10)
• John Heath-Stubbs wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Maxine Kumin's Up Country: Poems of New England
(1972) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 7)
• James Merrill wins the Bollingen Prize (Jan. 7)
• W. S. Merwin wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Conrad Aiken (Academy of American Poets Web site; US), at 84 (Aug. 17), of a heart attack; Kenneth Allott; W. H. Auden, at 66 (Sept. 28);
Arna Bontemps, at 70 (June 4), of a heart attack (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Charles Brasch; Noël Coward, at 73 (March 26), of a heart attack; Ramon Guthrie, at 77 (Nov. 22);
Pablo Neruda, (Sept 23), of leukemia; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); J. R. R. Tolkien, at 81 (Sept. 2); Francis Webb
1974
• David Jones' The Sleeping Lord
• Philip Larkin's High Windows
• Bruce Springsteen's song "Born to Run"
Awards
• Léonie Adams wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America
and Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck
win the National Book Award (April 18)
• Ted Hughes wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Robert T. S. Lowell Jr.'s The Dolphin
(1973) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 7)
Deaths
Edmund Clarke Blunden; Jacob Bronowski, at 66 (Aug. 22); Austin Clarke; Julian Davis, at 72 (Sept. 6), the gold-miner poet of "Cripple Creek Poem Poke" David Jones, at 78 (Oct. 28);
Ogden Nash, (May 19); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Tyler Parker, 70 (July 24);
John Crowe Ransom, at 86 (July 5); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Eric Roach;
Anne Sexton, at 45 (Oct. 4), of suicide; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1975
• Maya Angelou's Oh Pray My Wings are Gonna Fit Me Well
• Kenneth Koch's The Art of Love
• Stevie Smith's Collected Poems
Awards
• Robert Hayden wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Gary Snyder's Turtle Island
wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 5)
Births
Tony Tost (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Deaths
Roque Dalton, executed; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Lloyd Frankenberg, at 67 (March 12); Sir Julian Sorell Huxley; Chester Kallman, at 53 (Jan. 18);
Pat Lowther (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site), murdered by her husband, Roy Lowther; Sir Francis Meynell, at 84 (July 10); Sydney Goodsir Smith; Stanley Young, at 69 (March 22)
1976
• Marya Fiamengo's In Praise of Older Women
• Thom Gunn's Jack Straw's Castle
• Two poems written in 1965 by Mao Tse-tung just before the
cultural revolution, including "Two Birds: A Dialogue," are
published on Jan. 1 (Facts on File 36 [1976]: 9)
• Derek Walcott's Sea Grapes
Awards
• John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror (1975) wins the Pulitzer Prize (May 3) and
the National Book Award (April 19)
• Alex Derwent Hope wins the Robert Frost Award for Poetry
• J. V. Cunningham wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Benjamin Britten; Anne Elder; Richard A. W. Hughes; James McAuley;
Charles Reznikoff, (Jan. 22); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Louis Sissman, at 48 (March 10), of Hodgkin's disease (March 10)
1977
• Samuel Beckett's Collected Poems in English and
French
• Joseph Brodsky's A Part of Speech
• Donald Davies' To Scorch or Freeze
• Gay News is successfully
prosecuted for blasphemy and libel for
publishing James Kirkup's "The love that dares to speak
its name"
• Ted Hughes' Gaudete
Awards
• Louise Coxe wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Richard Eberhardt's Collected Poems wins
the National Book Award (April 11)
• James Merrill's Divine Comedies (1976)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 18)
• Norman Nicholson wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
Deaths
Gitaujali Badruddin; Katherine C. Biddle, at 87 (Dec. 30); Elizabeth Daryush;
Robert Lowell (Representative Poetry Online); Louis Untermeyer, at 92 (Dec. 18)
1978
• Maya Angelou's And Still I Rise
• Craig Raine's The Onion, Memory
• Stevie, a film directed by Robert
Enders, based on Hugh Whitemore's play about the poet
Stevie Smith, played here by Glenda Jackson
Awards
• Josephine Miles wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Howard Nemerov's Collected Poems
(1977) wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 17) and the
National Book Award (April 10)
Deaths
Faith Baldwin, at 84 (March 19); Martin Bell; Gilbert Highet, at 71 (Jan. 20), of cancer;
Hugh MacDiarmid (Representative Poetry Online);
Phyllis McGinley (Representative Poetry Online);
Frank Stanford, at 29 (June 3), by suicide; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Sylvia Townsend Warner; John Hall Wheelock, at 91 (March 22); Louis Zukofsky, at 74 (May 12)
1979
• one copy of William Blake's Songs of
Innocence and Experience (1789) fetches £70,000 in London
• Ted Hughes' Moor Town
• Craig Raine's A Martian Sends a Postcard Home
• Derek Walcott's The Star-Apple Kingdom
Awards
• James Merrill's Mirabell: Books of Numbers
wins the National Book Award (April 23)
• Mark Strand and May Swenson win the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Robert Penn Warren's Now and Then
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 16)
Deaths
Elizabeth Bishop (Representative Poetry Online); I. A. Richards;
Allen Tate at 79 (Feb. 9), of emphysema (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
1980
• Derek Walcott's The Star-Apple Kingdom
Awards
• Donald Justice's Selected Poems
wins the Pulitzer Prize for 1980 (April 14)
• Mona Van Duyn wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Robert Hayden, at 66 (Feb. 25), of a heart ailment; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Julia Reynolds, at 98 (Nov. 28);
Muriel Rukeyser, at 66 (Feb. 12), of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); A. J. M. Smith;
James Wright, at 52 (March 25), of cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1981
Awards
• Kenneth Burke wins the National Medal for
Literature (April 30)
• Dennis J. Enright wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Richard Hugo wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Howard Nemerov and May Swenson win the Pulitzer Prize
• James Schuyler's The Morning of the
Poem wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 13)
Deaths
Isabella Stewart Gardner;
John Glassco;
Robert Garioch;
Eugenio Montale, at 85; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Helen Steiner Rice, at 80 (April 23), greeting-card poet
1982
• Margaret Avison's Winter Sun / The
Dumbfounding: Poems 1940-66
• Gitaujali Badruddin's Poems of
Gitaujali, posthumously published
• Louise Simone Bennett's Selected Poems
• Dylan Thomas was posthumously honoured by a floor plaque
in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey (March 1)
Awards
• John Ashbery and John Frederick Nims
win the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• William Bronk receives the American Book Award
for Life Supports (April 27)
• Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems (1981),
introduced by Ted Hughes, wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 12)
Deaths
Djuna Barnes, at 90 (June 18); P'Bitek; Babette Deutsch, at 87 (Nov. 13); Horace Gregory, at 83 (March 11);
Richard Hugo, at 58 (Oct. 22), of leukemia; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Archibald MacLeish, at 89 (April 20); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Kenneth Rexroth, at 76 (June 6), of a heart ailment; Edgell Rickword; Maria Zaturenska, at 80 (Jan. 19), of heart failure
1983
• Maya Angelou's Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?
• Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Poems 1927-1979,
published posthumously
• Amy Clampitt's Kingfisher
Awards
• Philip Booth and James Schuyler win the Academy of
American Poets Fellowship
• Anthony E. Hecht and John Hollander win the Bollingen Prize
• Galway Kinnell's Selected Poems
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 18)
• Kinnell's collection and Charles Wright's Country Music
win the American Book Award (April 28)
Deaths
Ted Berrigan, at 48 (July 4) (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Edwin Denby, at 80 (July 12), by suicide;
R. Buckminster Fuller, at 87 (July 1), of a heart attack;
Frances Horovitz;
Alden Nolan;
Robert Payne, at 71 (Feb. 18)
1984
• Seamus Heaney's Station Island
• Philip Larkin turns down the British Poet Laureateship,
and Ted Hughes becomes Poet Laureate (Dec. 19)
• Craig Raine's Rich
• Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and "Glory Days"
Awards
• Robert Francis and Richard Lattimore
win the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Mary Oliver's American Primitive
wins the Pulitzer Prize for 1984 (April 16)
Deaths
Sir John Betjeman (Representative Poetry Online);
Richard Brautigan (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Sir William Empson, at 77 (April 15);
Jorge Guillén (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) Richard Lattimore, at 77 (Feb. 26), of cancer;
George Oppen, at 76 (July 2), of Alzheimer's disease; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Hal Porter, at 73 (Sept. 29); Jesse Stewart, at 76 (Feb. 17), of a stroke
1985
• Amy Clampitt's What the Light was Like
• Douglas Eaglesham Dunn's Elegies
• Robert Hayden's Collected Poems,
posthumously published
• Stephen Spender's Collected Poems 1947-80
Awards
• John Ashbery and Fred Chappell win the Bollingen Prize for their life's works (Jan. 15)
• Amy Clampitt and Maxime Kumin win
the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Douglas Dunn's Elegies wins a
Whitbread literary award (Jan. 28)
• Carolyn Kizer's Yin wins the
Pulitzer Prize (April 24)
• Norman MacCaig wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Sharon Olds's The Dead and the Living
wins the National Book Critics Circle award (Jan. 14)
Deaths
Basil Bunting, at 85 (April 17);
J. V. Cunningham (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Robert Graves, at 90; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Robert Stuart Fitzgerald, at 74 (Jan. 16); Robert Graves, at 90 (Dec. 7); Geoffrey Grigson, at 80 (Nov. 25); Alfred Hayes, at 74 (Aug. 14), of menengitis, poet of the labor song "Joe Hill";
Philip Larkin, at 63 (Dec. 2), of throat cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Josephine Miles, of pneumonia; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Robert Nathan, at 91 (May 25), of kidney failure;
F. R. Scott (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site), at 85 (Jan. 31);
1986
• Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa for Kingsley
Amis becomes a best-seller
• the Pforzheimer Collection of the works of
Percy Bysshe Shelley and his circle is donated to the
New York Public Library (Dec. 18)
• US President Ronald Reagan demonstrates the educational
value of memorization by reciting lines from Robert Service's
"The Cremation of Sam McGee" (March 4)
• Robert Penn Warren, first US Poet Laureate,
1986-87 (Jan. 26)
Awards
• Afrikaner poet Breten Breytenbach wins the
Rapport Prize in South Africa (April 12)
• Irving Feldman and Howard Moss win
the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Louise Gluck's The Triumph of Achilles
wins the National Book Critics Circle Award (Feb. 17)
• Peter Reading's Stet wins the Whitbread Poetry Award
• Adrienne Rich wins the Lilly Prize (June 6);
• Wole Soyinka wins the Nobel Prize (Oct. 16)
• Henry Taylor's The Flying Change
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 17)
Deaths
Milton Acorn, at 63 (Aug. 20), of heart disease and diabetes (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); John Ciardi, at 69 (March 30), of a heart attack; Elizabeth Coatsworth, at 93 (Aug. 31); William Sydney Graham; Brion Gysin, at 70 (July 13);
Bob Kaufman, at 60 (Jan. 12), of emphysema; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Henry Reed, at 72 (Dec. 8); Elizabeth Smart, at 72 (March); Rex Warner
1987
• Maya Angelou's Now Sheba Sings the Song
• U.S. Supreme Court Justices William J. Brennan, Jr.,
Harry A. Blackman, and John Paul Stevens rule unanimously
that Shakespeare's sonnets were written by Shakespeare,
not by Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford (Sept. 25)
• Richard Wilbur, US Poet Laureate, 1987-88 (April 17)
• Jay Wright's Selected Poems
Awards
• Joseph Brodsky (a US citizen from 1972)
wins the Nobel Prize for literature (Oct. 22)
• Alfred Corn and Josephine Jacobsen win
the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah
wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (April 16)
• Seamus Heaney's The Haw
Lantern wins the Whitbread literary award
• Edward Hirsch's Wild Gratitude
wins the National Book Critics Circle award (Jan. 12)
• Stanley Kunitz wins the Bollingen Prize (Feb. 10)
• Philip Levine wins the Lilly Prize (July 4)
Deaths
Richard Lehmann;
John Logan, (Nov. 6); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Gwendolyn MacEwen (Representative Poetry Online); Howard Moss, poetry editor of
The New Yorker, at 65 (Sept. 16), from a heart attack; Glenway Wescott, at 85 (Feb. 22), from a stroke
1988
• Joseph Brodsky's To Urania
• Philip Larkin's Collected Poems
• Howard Nemerov becomes US Poet Laureate (May 16)
Awards
• Anthony Hecht wins the Lilly Prize (June 3)
• Donald Justice wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• William Meredith's Partial Accounts
wins the Pulitzer Prize (March 31)
• Peter Porter's The Automatic Oracle
wins a Whitbread literary award
• Derek Walcott wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• C. K. Williams' Flesh and Blood wins the
National Book Critics Circle Award (Jan. 11)
Deaths
Léonie Fuller Adams (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Sterling Brown;
Henry Coulette;
Robert Duncan, at 69 (Feb. 3), of a heart attack;
John Clellon Holmes, at 62 (March 30), of cancer;
Miguel Pinero, at 41 (June 16), of cirrhosis of the liver;
Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, at 90 (Oct. 1)
1989
• The Dead Poets Society, a film
directed by Peter Weir, with a screenplay by
Tom Schulman and excerpts from many traditional
poets, ending with the title and opening line of
Walt Whitman's lament on the death of Abraham
Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!"
• Edward Dorn's The Gunslinger
• Rita Dove's Grace Notes
• My Left Foot, a film directed
by Jim Sheridan about Christy Brown, the Irish poet, and based
on his autobiography
• Howard Nemerov, US Poet Laureate, 1988-90
Awards
• Edgar Bowers is awarded the Bollingen Prize
for For Louis Pasteur
• Allen Curnow wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Michael Donaghy's Shibboleth wins the Whitbread
Poetry Award
• Donald Hall's The One Day wins the
National Book Critics Circle award (July 9)
• Richard Howard wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Mona Van Duyn wins the Lilly Prize (June 2)
• Richard Wilbur's New and Collected
Poems wins the Pulitzer Prize (March 30)
Deaths
Richard Willard Armour, at 82 (Feb. 28), of Parkinson's disease;
Sterling Allen Brown, at 87 (Jan. 13), of leukemia; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
May Swenson (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Robert Penn Warren, at 84 (Sept. 15), of cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1990
• Maya Angelou's I Shall Not be Moved
• Allen Ginsberg is crowned Majelis King in Prague
on May Day
• Mark Strand, US Poet Laureate, 1990-91 (May 25)
Awards
• Hayden Carruth wins the Lilly Prize (June 1)
• Paul Durcan's Daddy, Daddy
wins the Whitbread Poetry Prize
• Rodney Jones' Transparent Gestures wins the
National Book Critics Circle award (Feb. 12)
• Sorley Maclean wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• William Meredith wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• James Merrill's The Inner Room wins the
Library of Congress Bobbitt National Prize (Oct. 26)
• Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 12)
Deaths
Frances Chung (US); Lawrence George Durrell
1991
• W. H. Auden's Collected Poems
• Joseph Brodsky, US Poet Laureate, 1991-92 (May 10)
• Wendy Cope's best-selling Serious Concerns
Awards
• Amy Gerstler wins the National Book Critics Circle Award
• Laura Riding Jackson's The Word "Women" and other
Related Writings and Donald Justice's New and Selected Poems
win the Bollingen Prize (Jan. 30)
• Philip Levine's What Work Is wins the National
Book Award (Nov. 20)
• Michael Longley's Gorse Fires wins the Whitbread
Poetry Prize
• J. D. McClatchy wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Mona Van Duyn's Near Changes
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 9)
• David Wagoner wins the Lilly Prize
• Judith Wright wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
Deaths
George Barker; R. F. Brissenden; Paul Engle; Roy Fuller;
Etheridge Knight (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Howard Nemerov, at 71 (July 5), of cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Laura Riding Jackson, at 90 (Sept. 2), of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
James Schuyler, at 67 (April 12), of a stroke (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
George Thaniel (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
1992
• Mona Van Duyn, US Poet Laureate, 1992-93 (June 14)
Awards
• John Ashbery wins the Lilly Prize
• Albert Goldbarth's Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology
wins the National Book Critics Circle Award (Feb. 14)
• Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, about AIDS, wins the
Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection (UK and Eire)
• Tony Harrison's The Gaze of the Gorgon wins the
Whitbread Poetry Prize
• Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems wins
the National Book Award for poetry (Nov. 18)
• Adrienne Rich wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• James Tate's Selected Poems (1991)
wins the Pulitzer Prize for 1992 (April 7)
• Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to
Derek Walcott (Oct. 8)
Deaths
Kenneth Burke; George MacBeth (Feb. 16), of motor neuron disease; Robert W. V. Gittings;
Audre Lorde (Representative Poetry Online);
Eve Merriam, (née Moskowitz; April 11), of cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1993
• Maya Angelou reads "On the Pulse of Morning" at the
inauguration of President William Clinton (Jan. 20)
• Bound by Honor, a film
directed by Taylor Hackford, based on the life
of poet Jimmy Santiaga Baca, who co-wrote the
screenplay
• Geoffrey Dearmer's A Pilgrim's Song: Selected Poems
• Rita Dove, 7th US Poet Laureate, 1993-95 (May 18)
• Poetic Justice, a film directed by
John Singleton: Maya Angelou's poetry is featured,
and she appears as Aunt June
• Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia"
Awards
• A. R. Ammons' Garbage wins the National Book Award
for poetry
• Hayden Carruth's Collected Poems 1946-1991
wins the National Book Critics Circle poetry award (Feb. 28)
• Ciaran Carson's First Language wins the
T. S. Eliot Prize
• Carol Ann Duffy's Mean Time wins the
Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Prize
• Louise Glück's The Wild Iris
(1992) wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 13)
• Stanley Kunitz wins the National Medal of Arts (Oct. 7)
• Kathleen Raine wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Gerald Stern wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Mark Strand's Dark Harbor wins the Bollingen Prize
• Charles Wright wins the Lilly Poetry Prize (May 4)
1994
• Four Weddings and a Funeral, a film
directed by Mike Newell in which W. H. Auden's "Stop all the
clocks" is read as a eulogy
• Craig Raine's History: The Home Movie
• John Wain's Hungry Generations
Awards
• Gwendolyn Brooks wins the National Book Foundation
Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters for her
Annie Allen (Nov. 16)
•
Mark Doty's
My Alexandria wins the National
Book Critics Circle Award (Feb. 13)
• James Fenton's
Out of Danger wins the Whitbread
Poetry Prize
• David Ferry wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Donald Hall wins the Lilly Poetry Prize
• Alan Jenkins'
Harm wins the Forward Prize
for Best Poetry Collection
• Yusef Komunyakaa's
Neon Vernacular (1993)
wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 12)
• W. S. Merwin wins the Academy of American Poets Tanning
Prize (Sept. 29)
• Paul Muldoon's
The Annals of Chile wins the
T. S. Eliot Prize
• James Tate's
Worshipful Company of Fletchers
wins the National Book Award for poetry (Nov. 16)
• Richard Wilbur wins the National Medal of Arts (Oct. 14)
Deaths
Charles Bukowski, of leukemia (March 9); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Amy Clampitt, (Sept. 10), of ovarian cancer; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Lynda Hull, in an automobile accident; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Peter Quennel; John Wain (May 24), of a stroke
1995
• Robert Hass is named US Poet Laureate 1995-97 (May 7)
• Jim Mays, head of English at University College, Dublin,
announces that 300 poems by S. T. Coleridge have been discovered (Feb. 16)
• Sotheby's uncovers four Walt Whitman notebooks (Feb. 17)
Awards
• A. R. Ammons wins the Lilly Poetry Prize (April 26)
• Gwendolyn Brooks wins the National Medal of Arts (Oct. 5)
•
Mark Doty's
My Alexandria wins the T. S. Eliot Prize
• Seamus Heaney wins the Nobel Prize for Literature (Oct. 5)
• Kenneth Koch's
One Train wins the Bollingen Prize (Feb. 6)
• Stanley Kunitz's
Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected wins the National Book Award for poetry
• Denise Levertov wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Philip Levine's
Simple Truth (1994) wins the
Pulitzer Prize (April 18)
• Sean O'Brien's
Ghost Train wins the Forward Prize
for Best Poetry Collection
• Bernard O'Donoghue's
Gunpowder wins the
Whitbread Poetry Prize
• Mark Rudman's
Rider wins the National Book Critics
Circle poetry award (Feb. 26)
• James Tate wins the Academy of American Poets
Tanning Prize (Sept. 19)
Deaths
Kingsley Amis, at 73 (Oct. 22), after an accidental fall;
Earle Birney (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Donald Davie, at 73 (Sept. 18), of cancer;
Essex Hemphill, from complications relating to AIDS; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Helene Johnson (July 7), after osteoporosis;
Jane Kenyon, (April), of leukemia; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
James Merrill, at 68 (Feb. 6), of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
May Sarton (Representative Poetry Online);
Sir Stephen Spender, at 86 (July 16), of a heart ailment; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1996
• Dead Man, a film directed by Jim
Jarmusch about a man named William Blake who goes on a
trek through the western US and is taken by a character
named Nobody as the resurrected Romantic poet
Awards
• Hayden Carruth's Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey:
Poems 1991-1995 wins the National Book Award (Nov. 6)
• John Fuller's Stones and Fires wins the
Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection
• Jorie Graham's The Dream of the Unified Field
(1995) wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 9)
• Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level wins the
Whitbread Prize (Jan. 21, 1997)
• William Matthews' Time & Money wins the
National Book Critics Circle poetry award (March 21)
• Sir Les Murray's Subhuman Redneck Poems wins
the T. S. Eliot Prize
• Peter Redgrove wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Adrienne Rich wins the Tanning Prize
• Gerald Stern wins the Lilly Prize
• Jay Wright wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
Deaths
Joseph Brodsky (Representative Poetry Online); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US) George M. Brown, at 74 (April 13); Geoffrey Dearmer, at 103 (Aug. 18);
Larry Levis, at 49, of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Mina Loy (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
1997
• Miller Williams of Arkansas reads his poem, "Of
History and Hope," at the inauguration of President Clinton
(Jan. 20)
• Regeneration, a film based on Pat Barker's novel of
the same name, about the World War I poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried
Sassoon
• Wilde, a film directed by Brian Gilbert, on the
life of Oscar Wilde
• Robert Pinsky becomes new US Poet Laureate, 1997-2000
Awards
• John Haines wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Robert Hass' Sun under Wood wins the Book Critics
Circle Award (March 18)
• Anthony Hecht wins the Tanning Prize
• Ted Hughes wins the Whitbread Award for Tales
from Ovid (Jan. 27, 1998)
• William Matthew wins the Lilly Prize
• William Meredith's Effort at Speech wins the National
Book Award (Nov. 18)
• Lisel Mueller's Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
(1996) wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 7)
• Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers without End
wins the Bollingen Prize
Deaths
James Dickey, at 73 (Jan. 19); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
Allen Ginsberg, at 70, of liver cancer (April 5); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US)
David Ignatow (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); James Laughlin, at 83 (Nov. 12); Laurie Lee, at 82 (May 15);
Denise Levertov (Representative Poetry Online);
William Matthews, at 55, (Nov. 12), of a heart attack; (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Anne Marriott (Representative Poetry Online)
1998
Awards
• A. R. Ammons wins the Tanning Prize
• Paul Farley's The Boy from the Chemist
is here to see you, wins the Forward award for the
best first collection of poems
• Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, a volume of
poems addressed to his late first wife, Sylvia Plath, wins the
Whitbread Award (Jan. 27, 1999)
• W. S. Merwin wins the Lilly Prize (July 8)
• Sir Les Murray wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Charles Simic wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Gerald Stern's This Time wins the National Book
Award (Nov. 18) and the National Book Critics Circle Award
• Charles Wright wins the Pulitzer Prize for Black
Zodiac (April 14)
Deaths
John Malcolm Brinnin; Aimee Joan Grunberger, of cancer, at 44;
Zbigniew Herbert (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Ted Hughes, of cancer (Oct. 28); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Janet Lewis (Dec. 1); Hilda Morley, at 81;
Octavio Paz, Mexican poet (April 19); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); Martin Seymour-Smith (July 1)
1999
• Ernest Hemingway's oldest son John donates
his father's Three Stories and Ten Poems to the
Library of Congress
• Andrew Motion becomes British Poet Laureate (May 19)
• Robert Pinsky becomes US Poet Laureate (April 27)
• Scotland's Parliament opened with the singing of Robert Burns'
"A Man's a Man For A'That," instead of "God Save The Queen" (July 1)
Awards
• Ai's Vice: New and Selected Poems wins
the National Book Award (Nov. 17)
• Gwendolyn Brooks wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Robert Creeley's So There and Life & Death
win the Bollingen Prize (Feb. 9)
• Seamus Heaney wins the Whitbread Prize for his translation
of Beowulf (Jan. 2000)
• Maxime Kumin wins the Lilly Prize
• Jackson MacLow wins the Tanning Prize
• Edwin Morgan wins the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (UK)
• Marie Ponsot wins the Book Critics Circle Award for The Bird Catcher (March 8)
• Adrienne Rich wins the Lannan Foundation Lifetime
Achievement Award (Oct.)
• Mark Strand wins the Pulitzer Prize for Blizzard of One (April 12)
Deaths
Patricia Beer, at 79; Edward Dorn, 70 (Dec.); Ida Affleck Graves, 97 (Dec.) Moondog, street poet (aka Louis T. Hardin), 83 (Sept. 8);
John Frederick Nims, (Jan. 13); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Shel Silverstein, 66 (May 9); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
2000
• Stanley Kunitz is appointed US Poet Laureate (July 31)
• Janice Mirikitani succeeds Lawrence Ferlinghetti as
San Francisco's Poet Laureate (Feb.)
• National Poetry Day in Great Britain (Oct. 4): 300 school children
at the Royal Festival Hall and 4,000 persons nationwide performed Patience
Agbabi's "Word," a new Guinness World Record for simultaneous mass
performance of a poem
• Edward Lear's "
The Owl and the Pussycat" named Britain's
favourite children's poem in a BBC Poll (Oct. 3)
• Justin Trudeau quotes from Robert Frost's "
Stopping by Woods"
at the funeral of his father, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
(Oct. 3)
• Spike Milligan is made an honorary knight
Awards
• John Burnside's The Asylum Dance wins the
Whitbread Poetry Award
• Anne Carson and Lucia Perillo win MacArthur Fellowships
(June 13)
• Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Book wins the
National Book Award
• Carl Dennis wins the Lilly Prize (April 17)
• Lyn Hejinian wins the Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• Ruth Stone's Ordinary Words wins the National
Book Critics Circle Award (March 13)
• Hugo Williams's Billy's Rain wins the T. S. Eliot
Prize (Jan.)
• C. K. Williams' Repair wins the Pulitzer Prize (April 10)
• Maya Angelou wins the National Medal of Arts (Dec. 14)
• Frank Bidart wins the Wallace Stevens Award, formerly the Tanning Prize (Dec. 15)
• David Ferry's Of No Country I Know wins the Rebekah
Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (Dec. 18)
Deaths
Yehuda Amichai (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Edgar Bowers, at 75, of non-Hodgkins' lymphoma;
Gwendolyn Brooks (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
John Bruce (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Roland Flint, at 66 (Jan. 2), of cancer;
A. D. Hope (Representative Poetry Online);
Al Purdy (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site), at 81 (April 21), of lung cancer;
Libby Scheier (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site);
Karl Shapiro, at 86 (May 14); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US); R. S. Thomas, 87 (Sept. 25); Judith Wright, 85, of a heart attack; William Scammell (Nov. 29); Gwendolyn Brooks, 83 (Dec. 3), of cancer; Adrian Henry (Dec. 20)
2001
• Billy Collins is named US Poet Laureate (June 20), starting October
• (Canadian) P. K. Page's poem "Planet Earth" was selected by Marilyn
Hacker to be read during the last week in March as part of the United Nations
project, "Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry," at the U.N. building in New York,
Mount Everest, the West Philippines Sea, and Antarctica. Over 200 poetry readings
in 150 cities worldwide took place that week.
• Professor John Basinger, 67, performed, from memory, John Milton's
Paradise Lost at Three Rivers Community-Technical College in Norwich,
Connecticutt, on Dec. 7-9, a feat that took 18 hours
Awards
• Judy Jordan's Carolina Ghost Woods wins the Book Critics Circle Award (March 12)
• Stephen Dunn's Different Hours wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (April 16)
• Yusef Komunyakaa wins the Lilly Prize (April 26)
• Alan Dugan's "Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry" wins the National
Book Award for Poetry (Nov.)
• Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours wins the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband wins the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Awarded by the Poetry Book Society
Deaths
A. R. Ammons (Feb. 25; Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Gregory N. Corso, 70 (Jan. 17; Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Agha Shahid Ali (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Louis Dudek (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Anne Ridler, 89 (Oct. 16) Andrew Waterhouse (Oct. 20); Elizabeth Jennings (Oct. 26); Pamela Gillilan (Oct. 26); David Gascoyne (Nov. 25);
Helen Bevington (Representative Poetry Online)
2002
Awards
• Christian Bök's Eunoia wins the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Alice Notley's Disobedience wins the International Griffin Poetry Prize
• Alice Oswald's Dart wins the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry awarded by the Poetry Book Society
• Carl Dennis's Practical Gods wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
Deaths
June Jordan, of breast cancer (June 14); (Academy of American Poets Web site; US);
Kenneth Koch (Representative Poetry Online)
2003
Awards
• Paul Muldoon's Moy Sand and Gravel wins the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
• Margaret Avison's Concrete and Wild Carrot wins the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Don Paterson's Landing Light wins T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Book Society
2004
Ted Kooser is appointed US Poet Laureate on August 12
Awards
• August Kleinzahler's The Strange Hours Travelers Keep wins the International Griffin Poetry Prize
• Anne Simpson's Loop wins the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Franz Wright's Walking to Martha's Vineyard wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
• George Szirtes' Reel wins T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Book Society
2005
Awards
• Charles Simic's Selected Poems 1963-2003 wins the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize
• Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida wins the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize
• Ted Kooser's Delights and Shadows wins the Pulitzer Prize for poetry
• Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture wins T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Book Society
Deaths
Stanley Kunitz, May 14, in Manhattan;
Malca Litovitz (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site)
2006
Awards
• Sylvia Legris's Nerve Squall wins the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize for 2006, and the 2006 Pat Lowther Memorial Award
• Kamau Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses wins the 2006 International Griffin Poetry Prize
• Claudia Emerson's Late Wife wins the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry
Deaths
Louise Bennett-Coverley (Jamaica), "Miss Lou", folk poet, July 26; Ivor Cutler (UK), March 3; Patricia Goedicke (US), of pneumonia, July 14;
Irving Layton, Jan. 4, of Alzheimer's disease (Canada; Canadian Poetry Web site); Trinidad Sánchez Jr. (US); Muriel Spark (Scotland)
