# 1960 in poetry

"none" is preferred when the title is sufficiently descriptive; see [[WP:SDNONE]] Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

## Events

* Spring – August Derleth launches the poetry magazine Hawk and Whippoorwill in the United States.
* September 5 – Welsh poet Waldo Williams is imprisoned for six weeks for non-payment of income tax (a protest against defence spending).
* An inscription of an excerpt of the Poema de Fernán González is discovered on a roofing tile in Merindad de Sotoscueva, the earliest known record of it.

## 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

* Margaret Avison, Winter Sun
* Daryl Hine, The Devil's Picture Book
* Kenneth McRobbie, Eyes Without a Face
* Eli Mandel, Fuseli Poems
* Peter Miller, Sonata for Frog and Man

#### Anthologies

* Edmund Snow Carpenter, American anthropologist, editor, Anerca, anonymous Eskimo poems, with drawings by Enooesweetok
* A. J. M. Smith, editor, The Oxford book of Canadian verse, in English and French, including untranslated poems in French combined in chronological order with English-language poems

### India, in English

* Nissim Ezekiel, The Unfinished Man: Poems Written in 1959, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
* Dom Moraes, John Nobody, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
* Deb Kumar Das, The Night before Us, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
* Pradip Sen, And Then the Sun, first edition (revised edition, 1968), Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
* Raul De Loyola Furtado, The Oleanders and Other Poems, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
* Keshav Malik, The Rippled Shadow
* Barjor Paymaster, the Last Farewell and Other Poems, Bombay: Asia Publishing House
* V. Madhusudan Reddy, Sapphires of Solitude, Hyderabad: V. Man Mohan Reddy
* Sasthi Brata, Eleven Poems, Calcutta: published by the author

### United Kingdom

* W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio
* Sir John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
* Edwin Bronk, A Family Affair, Northwood, Middlesex: Scorpion Press
* Austin Clarke, The Hore-Eaters (see also Ancient Lights 1955, Too Great a Vine 1957)
* Patric Dickinson, The World I See
* Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems
* D. J. Enright, Some Men Are Brothers
* Ted Hughes, Lupercal, London: Faber and Faber; New York: Harper
* John Knight, Straight Lines and Unicorns
* Peter Levi, The Gravel Ponds
* Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling
* Norman MacCaig, A Common Grace
* Dom Moraes, Poems, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
* Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (posthumous)
* Sylvia Plath, The Colossus and Other Poems, American at this time living in the United Kingdom
* William Plomer, Collected Poems
* Peter Redgrove, The Collector, and Other Poems, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
* James Reeves, Collected Poems 1929–59
* Charles Tomlinson, Seeing is Believing
* Andrew Young, Collected Poems

### United States

* John Ashbery, The Poems
* W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio
* Paul Blackburn, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit: A Bouquet for Flatbush
* Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters, including "We Real Cool"
* Witter Bynner, New Poems
* Gregory Corso, The Happy Birthday of Death
* Louis Coxe, The Middle Passage
* E. E. Cummings, Collected Poems
* James Dickey, Into the Stone
* Robert Duncan:
** The Opening of the Field
** Selected Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Books
* Richard Eberhart, Collected Poems 1930–1960
* Paul Engle, Poems in Praise, including the sonnet sequence "For the Iowa Dead"
* Jean Garrigue, A Water Walk by Villa d'Este
* Ramon Guthrie, Graffiti
* Anthony Hecht, A Bestiary
* Daryl Hine, The Devil's Picture Book
* Daniel G. Hoffman, A Little Geste and Other Poems
* Randall Jarrell, The Woman at the Washington Zoo, New York: Atheneum
* LeRoi Jones, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, New York: Totem/Corinth Books
* Donald Justice, The Summer Anniversaries
* Weldon Kees, The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees posthumous, edited by Donald Justice
* Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues
* Galway Kinnell, What a Kingdom It Was, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
* Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
* Robert Lowell, Life Studies, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy
* Phyllis McGinley, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades
* James Merrill, Water Street, Atheneum Publishers
* W. S. Merwin:
** The Drunk in the Furnace, New York: Macmillan (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975)
** Translator, The Satires of Persius, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press
* Joesphine Miles, Poems 1930–1960
* Howard Moss, A Winter Come, a Summer Gone: Poems 1946-1960, New York: Scribner's
* Howard Nemerov, New and Selected Poems, University of Chicago Press
* John Frederick Nims, Knowledge of the Evening
* Charles Olson:
** The Distances, New York: Grove Press
** The Maximus Poems, New York: Jargon/Corinth Books
* Kenneth Patchen, Because It Is
* Ezra Pound, Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares, multi-lingual cantos
* Carl Sandburg, Wind Song
* Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Boston: Houghton Mifflin
* Wilfred Townley Scott, Scrimshaw
* W. D. Snodgrass, Heart's Needle
* Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts
* William Stafford, West of Your City
* Eleanor Ross Taylor, Wilderness of Ladies
* Theodore Weiss, Outlanders, New York: Macmillan
* Reed Whittemore, The Self-Made Man and Other Poems
* Yvor Winters, Collected Poems, Chicago: The Swallow Press

#### Criticism, scholarship and biography

* Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (college textbook), originally published in 1938, goes into its third edition (a fourth will be published in 1976)
* Ed Dorn, What I See in the Maximum Poems, Migrant Press (criticism)
* Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance, an attack on the dominant critical values of modern poetry in the vein of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound

#### The New American Poetry 1945-1960

The New American Poetry 1945-1960, a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960, aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets. In the longer term it attained a classic status, with critical approval and continuing sales. It was reprinted in 1999.
Poets represented:
Helen Adam – John Ashbery – Paul Blackburn – Robin Blaser – Ebbe Borregaard – Bruce Boyd – Ray Bremser – Brother Antoninus – James Broughton – Paul Carroll – Gregory Corso – Robert Creeley – Edward Dorn – Kirby Doyle – Robert Duerden – Robert Duncan – Larry Eigner – Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Edward Field – Allen Ginsberg – Madeline Gleason – Barbara Guest – LeRoi Jones – Jack Kerouac – Kenneth Koch – Philip Lamantia – Denise Levertov – Ron Loewinsohn – Edward Marshall – Michael McClure – David Meltzer – Frank O'Hara – Charles Olson – Joel Oppenheimer – Peter Orlovsky – Stuart Perkoff – James Schuyler – Gary Snyder – Gilbert Sorrentino – Jack Spicer – Lew Welch – Philip Whalen – John Wieners – Jonathan Williams

### Other in English

* Allen Curnow, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, New Zealand

## Works in other languages

Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:

### French language
#### Canada, in French

* Anne Hébert, Poèmes
* Michèle Lalonde:
** Songe de la fiancée détruite
** Geôles
* Paul Morin, Géronte et son mirior
* Jean-Guy Pilon, La mouette et le large, Montréal: l'Hexagone
* Yves Préfontaine, L'Antre du poème
* Pierre Trottier, Les Belles au bois dormant
* Gilles Vigneault, Etraves

##### Criticism, scholarship and biography

* Gérard Bessette, Les Images en poésie canadienne-française

#### France

* Louis Aragon, Les Poetes
* Aimé Césaire, Ferrements, Martinique author published in France; Paris: Editions du Seuil
* Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, Evidences
* Michel Deguy, Fragments du cadastre
* Mohammed Dib, Ombre gardienne, with a preface by Louis Aragon
* Jean Follain, Des Heures
* Paul Géraldy, Vous et moi
* Pierre Jean Jouve, Proses
* Pierre Oster, Un nom toujours nouveau
* Saint-John Perse, Chronique
* Jacques Prévert, Histoires
* Tchicaya U Tam'si, À triche-coeur

### Spanish language
#### Latin America

* Manuel Blanco-González, La luna et lluvia
* Dolores Castro, Cantares de vela
* Pablo Antonio Cuadra, El jaguar y la luna (Nicaragua), winner of the Rubén Darío Prize
* Manuel Durán, La paloma azul
* Germán Pardo García, Centauro al sol
* León de Greiff, Obras completas, with a preliminary study by Jorge Zalamea (Colombia)
* Carlos García-Prada, editor, Escala del sueño, anthology of 35 Castilian lyrical poets
* Elías Nandino, Nocturna palabra (Mexico)

##### Criticism, scholarship and biography

* Emilio Armaza, Eguren, an anthology and analysis of the Peruvian poet's verse
* Antonio Oliver Belmás, Este otro Rubén Darío
* Gastón Figueira, De la vida y la obra de Gabriela Mistral
* Manuel Pedro González, editor, Antología crítica de José Marti, including writing by Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Unamuno, and Onís
* Glen L. Kolb, Juan del Valle y Caviedes, "A Study of the Life, Times and Poetry of a Spanish Colonial Satirist"
* Eduardo Neale-Silva, Horizonte humano, the first detailed biographical study of the Colombian poet José Eustasio Rivera
* Federico de Onís, Luis Palês Matos—vida y obra-bibliografía, antología, poesías, inéditas, a study of the Puerto Rican poet's life and artistic development

### Other

* Odysseus Elytis, Έξη και μια τύψεις για τον ουρανό ("Six Plus One Remorses For The Sky"), Greece
* H. M. Enzensberger, editor, Museum der modernen Poesie, anthology of international modernist poetry, German
* Haim Gouri, Shoshanat Ruhot ("Compass Rose"), Israeli writing in Hebrew
* Jess Ørnsbo, Digte ("Poems"), Denmark
* Klaus Rifbjerg, Konfrontation, Denmark
* Kedarnath Singh, Abhi Bilkul Abhi, Allahabad: Natya Sahitya Prakashan; India, Hindi

## Awards and honors

* Nobel Prize in Literature: St. John Perse (France)

### United Kingdom

* Eric Gregory Award: Christopher Levenson
* Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: John Betjeman

### United States

* National Book Award for Poetry: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
* Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: W. D. Snodgrass: Heart's Needle
* Bollingen Prize: Delmore Schwartz
* Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets: Jesse Stuart

### Prizes from other nations

* First State Poetry Price (Greece): Odysseus Elytis
* Prix Dante (France): Pierre Jean Jouve
* Canada: Governor General's Award, poetry or drama: Winter Sun, Margaret Avison
* Canada: Governor General's Award, Poésie et théâtre: Poèmes, Anne Hébert

## Births

* January 28 – Robert von Dassanowsky, American academic, writer, poet, film and cultural historian and producer
* February 12 – George Elliott Clarke, Canadian poet and playwright
* April 1 – Frieda Hughes, English-born poet, children's writer and painter
* May 5 - Thomas Boberg, Danish poet and travel writer
* August 31 – Makarand Paranjape, Indian poet
* October 30 – Kathleen Flenniken, American writer, poet, editor and educator
* December 22 – Elvis McGonagall, born Richard Smith, Scottish-born slam poet
* Jeffery Donaldson, Canadian poet, critic and theorist
* Katrina Porteous, Scottish-born poet
* Dipti Saravanamuttu, Sri Lankan-Australian poet, academic, journalist and script writer, moves to Australia as a child in 1972
* Alexis Stamatis, Greek poet
* Karenne Wood, Native American poet

## Deaths

Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
* January 4 – Nima Yooshij, 62 (born 1897), Iranian poet
* January 14 – Ralph Chubb, 77 (born 1892), English poet, printer and artist
* February 21 – Walter D'Arcy Cresswell (born 1896), New Zealand poet
* February 28 – F. S. Flint (born 1885), English poet, translator and prominent member of the Imagist group
* March 23 – Franklin Pierce Adams, 78 (born 1881), American writer whose "The Conning Tower" column gave critical publicity to many poets and writers, translator of poetry
* May 30 – Boris Pasternak, 70 (born 1890), Russian poet and writer, winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 1958, lung cancer
* June 17 – Pierre Reverdy (born 1889), French poet
* August 8 – Harry Kemp, 76 (born 1883), American poet
* August 19 – Frances Cornford (born 1886), English poet
* August 25 – David Diop (born 1927), French West African poet, air crash
* October 9 – Fannie B. Linderman, 85 (born 1875), American poet, writer, educator, entertainer
* October 28 – Margarita Abella Caprile (born 1901), Argentine poet
* October 31 – H. L. Davis, 66 (born 1894), American fiction writer and poet
* November 5 – Richard Rudzitis, 62 (born 1898), Latvian poet, writer and philosopher
* November 9 – Yoshii Isamu 吉井勇 (born 1886), Japanese, Taishō and Shōwa period tanka poet and playwright
* December 25 – H. W. Garrod, 81 (born 1878), English literary scholar