1950 in poetry

	This is part of the List of years in poetry
Years in poetry:	1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953
Years in literature:	1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953
Decades in poetry:	1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s
Centuries in poetry:	19th century 20th century 21st century
Centuries:	19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades:	1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s
Years:	1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953

[edit] Events

Charles Olson publishes his seminal essay, Projective Verse. In this, he called for a poetry of "open field" composition to replace traditional closed poetic forms with an improvised form that should reflect exactly the content of the poem. This form was to be based on the line, and each line was to be a unit of breath and of utterance. The content was to consist of "one perception immediately and directly (leading) to a further perception". This essay was to become a kind of de facto manifesto for the Black Mountain poets.
George Oppen and his wife, Mary, move from the United States to Mexico, where their links to Communism are less problematic.
In the fall, the Beloit Poetry Journal is founded.

W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944
George Barker, The True Confession of George Barker, Denver: Alan Swallow^[1]
Basil Bunting, Poems: 1950
Nancy Cato, The Darkened Window
E. E. Cummings, Xaipe: Seventy-One Poems
Leah Bodine Drake, A Hornbook for Witches
John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright, editors, The Forsaken Garden: An Anthology of Poetry 1824-1909
Ezra Pound, Seventy Cantos
Mid-Century American Poets, an anthology including poets who came to prominence in the 1940s, including Robert Lowell, Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro, Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, and John Ciardi
Richard Wilbur, Ceremony and Other Poems, New York: Reynal and Hitchcock^[1]
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Later Poems

Ursula Bethell, Collected Poems, Christchurch: Caxton Press (posthumous)^[2]
Alistair Campbell, Mine Eyes Dazzle, Christchurch: Pegasus Press, including "The Return" and "Elegy"
M. K. Joseph, Imaginary Islands^[3]
Kendrick Smithyman, The Blind Mountain, Caxton
Hubert Witheford, The Shadow of the Flame^[3]

Haim Gouri, Ad A lot Ha-Shahar ("Till Dawn"), poetry and war diary, Israeli writing in Hebrew^[4]
Hillel Omer (who wrote under the name "Ayin Hillel"), Eretz Ha-Tzohorayim ("The Noon Country"), Publisher: Sifriat Poalim; Israel

April 4 — Charles Bernstein, American poet, critic, editor and teacher
April 28 — Carolyn Forché, American poet, editor, and human rights advocate
May 9:
- Christopher Dewdney, avant-garde Canadian poet
- Jorie Graham American poet and the editor of numerous volumes of poetry
June 21 — Anne Carson, Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and academic
December 24 — Dana Gioia, American poet who retired early from his career as a corporate executive at General Foods to write full time and later became chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
date not known:
- Frances Chung
- Theodore Deppe
- Susan L. Helwig
- Edward Hirsch American poet and academic
- Kim Maltman Canadian poet and physicist
- E. Ethelbert Miller
- Wayne Scott Ray
- Stan Rogal
- Kenneth Sherman
- Sandy Shreve
- Arthur Sze
- Chase Twichell, American poet and owner of her own publishing company, Ausable Press
- John Yau, American poet and critic

March 5 — Edgar Lee Masters, American poet, biographer and dramatist
May 4 — William Rose Benét, American poet, writer, editor, and the older brother of Stephen Vincent Benét
May 20 — John Gould Fletcher, Pulitzer Prize-winning American, Imagist poet and author
October 19 — Edna St. Vincent Millay, 58, of a heart attack;
December 26 — James Stephens, Irish poet and novelist
date not known — Xavier Villaurrutia, Mexican poet and dramatist

Poetry Portal

v • d • e

^ ^a ^b M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, "Selected Bibliography: Individual Volumes by Poets Discussed", pp 334-340
^ Web page titled "Ursula Bethell / New Zealand Literature File" at the University of Aukland Library website, accessed April 30, 2008
^ ^a ^b Web page titled "The Contemporary Scene" in An Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 1966 website, accessed April 21, 2008
^ [1]Web page titled "Haim Gouri" at the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature Web site, accessed October 6, 2007