1941 in poetry

	This is part of the List of years in poetry
Years in poetry:	1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944
Years in literature:	1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944
Decades in poetry:	1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s
Centuries in poetry:	19th century 20th century 21st century
Centuries:	19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades:	1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s
Years:	1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944

[edit] Events

Robert Frost in 1941, the year he wins the Frost Medal

September 3 — 19-year-old John Gillespie Magee, Jr., American poet and aviator, flew a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V and afterwards wrote "High Flight" about the experience, on December 11 he dies while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he had joined before the United States had officially entered World War II
The Antioch Review founded
Basil Bunting joins the RAF and is eventually sent to Iran as an intelligence officer and a translator during World War II.
December — In siege-bound Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, the second wife of Danil Kharms, trudge across the city to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building and collect a trunk full of manuscripts. They hide the manuscripts through the 1940s and 1950s, even bringing them to Siberia, then covertly show them to others in the 1960s. Their actions save much of Kharms' work for posterity as well as that of fellow poet Alexander Vvedensky (of whom only about a quarter of his output survives)^[1]
Under the Nazi occupation beginning in June 1941, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was among the Polish Jews interned in the Vilna Ghetto. He would escape and join the resistance in 1943. During the Nazi era, Sutzkever wrote over 80 poems, whose manuscripts he managed to save for postwar publication.
Ezra Pound applies to return to the United States but is refused. He begins appearing on Rome Radio, making statements against the Allies.^[2]

W. H. Auden, New Year Letters (or The Double Man)
Allen Curnow, Island Time (Caxton), New Zealand^[3]
T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, published in New English Weekly
G. S. Fraser, The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems
Federico García Lorca, Diván del Tamarit (Spanish for "The Diván of Tamarit", written in 1936, published posthumously this year
R. A. K. Mason, The Dark Will Lighten, New Zealand^[4]
Carl Rakosi, Selected Poems
John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism, criticism
Charles Reznikoff, Going To and Fro and Walking Up and Down, self-published
The White Horseman poetry anthology in Britain, featuring poets in the New Apocalyptics movement
William Carlos Williams, The Broken Span
Louis Zukofsky, 55 Poems

February 19 — Stephen Dobyns, American poet and novelist
March 1 — Robert Hass, American poet
March 22 — Billy Collins, American poet who served two terms as the 44th Poet Laureate of the United States (2001-2003)
May 17 — Lyn Hejinian, American poet essayist, translator and publisher often associated with the Language poets
May 22 — Simon J. Ortiz
August 4 — Robert Grenier, American poet essayist, and editor often associated with the Language poets
September 1 — Gwendolyn MacEwen (died 1987), a Canadian novelist and poet
October 2 — John Sinclair, American poet jailed in 1969 after selling two joints to undercover narcotics officers. In 1971 his case received international attention when John Lennon performed at a benefit concert on his behalf.
October 13 — John Snow, cricketer and poet
November 23 — Derek Mahon Irish poet
November 29 — Lloyd Schwartz
date not known:
- Toi Derricotte
- Rachel Blau DuPlessis
- Dave Margoshes
- Gibbons Ruark
- David Rosenfield
- Stephen Yenser

Alexander Vvedensky

August 7 — Rabindranath Tagore, 80, a Bengali poet, Brahmo Samaj (syncretic Hindu monotheist) philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose works reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (1913 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
August 30 — Jiri Orten
November 18 — Émile Nelligan, poet
date not known:
- Aline Kilmer
- Alexander Vvedensky, Russian poet with formidable influence on "unofficial" and avant-garde art during and after the times of the Soviet Union; arrested under suspicion of planning treason and shipped off to a labor camp, he died of dysentery on the way (for the fate of his poetry, see Events section above)

^ [1] Epstien, Thomas, "Vvedensky in Love", article in The New Arcadia Review "published by the Boston College Honors Program", Volume II, 2004, accessed December 8, 2006
^ Ackroyd, Peter, Ezra Pound, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1980, "Chronology" chapter, p 118
^ Allen Curnow Web page at the New Zealand Book Council website, accessed April 21, 2008
^ Allen Curnow Web page at the New Zealand Book Council website, accessed April 21, 2008