Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Events
January 20 – Chittadhar Hridaya begins a 6-year sentence of imprisonment in Kathmandu for writing poetry in Nepal Bhasa during which time he secretly composes his Buddhist epic Sugata Saurabha in the same language Spring – The Antioch Review is founded as a literary magazine at Antioch College in Ohio May 5 – Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin meet while both reading English at St John's College, Oxford August 18–19-year-old Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., American poet serving in Britain with the Royal Canadian Air Force (which he has joined before the United States has officially entered World War II), flies a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V from RAF Llandow in Wales and afterwards writes the sonnet "High Flight" about the experience (completed by September 3); on December 11 he dies in a collision over England September 6–7 – Under Nazi occupation, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever is among the Polish Jews interned in the Vilna Ghetto. He will escape and join the resistance in 1943. During the Nazi era, Sutzkever writes over 80 poems, whose manuscripts he manages to save for postwar publication c. October – The first known reference to Babi Yar in poetry is written soon after the Babi Yar massacres by the young Jewish-Ukrainian poet from Kiev and an eyewitness, Liudmila Titova (). Her poem "Babi Yar" will be discovered only in the 1990s December – During the Siege of Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, the second wife of Russian avant-garde poet Danil Kharms (arrested this summer on suspicion of treason and imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1 where he will die in 1942), trudge across the city to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building and collect a trunk full of manuscripts which they hide 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). Vvedensky, arrested in September in Kharkov for "counterrevolutionary agitation", was evacuated but died of pleurisy en route The surrealist magazine VVV is founded in New York City by French poet André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and David Hare
Works published in English
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:
Canada
Anne Marriott, Calling Adventurers!, Toronto: Ryerson Press. E. J. Pratt, Dunkirk, Toronto: Macmillan. Bertram Warr, Yet a Little Onwards, Broadsheet No. 3, Resurgam Younger Poets series, Favil Press.
India, in English
Sri Aurobindo, Poems ( Poetry in English ), Hyderabad: Government Central Press
Bimal Chandra Bose, Thought-Ray ( Poetry in English ), Calcutta: Biman Panthi Publishing House Baldoon Dhingra, Comes Ever the Dawn ( Poetry in English ), Lahore: Ripon Press Manjeri Sundaraman, Brief Orisons ( Poetry in English ), Madras: Hurley Press Thurairajah Tambimuttu, editor, Out of This War ( Poetry in English ), London: Fortune Press; anthology; Indian poetry published in the United Kingdom Hariprasad Sastri, editor and translator, Indian Mystic Verse, (3rd revised and enlarged edition 1984) anthology
United Kingdom
W. H. Auden, New Year Letter (sometimes incorrectly called New Year Letters, with an "s"), May (published as The Double Man in the United States in March), English poet living in the United States Laurence Binyon, The North Star, and Other Poems Edmund Blunden, Poems 1930–1940 Lilian Bowes Lyon, Tomorrow is a Revealing T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, published in New English Weekly, republished in Four Quartets, 1944 A Choice of Kipling's Verse by T. S. Eliot, published December 1941 G. S. Fraser, The Fatal Landscape and Other Poems Robert Greacen, The Bird, Northern Ireland poet J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece, editors, The White Horseman, poetry anthology featuring poets in the New Apocalyptics movement Louis MacNeice, Plant and Phantom John Pudney, "For Johnny" W. R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems, Northern Ireland poet Alan Ross, Summer Thunder A. L. Rowse, Poems of a Decade Sydney Goodsir Smith, Skail Wind, in Scots and English Tambimuttu, editor, Out of This War, London: Fortune Press; anthology; Indian poetry in English, published in the United Kingdom Terence Tiller, Poems, New Hogarth Library 5 Vernon Watkins, The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd, and Other Poems