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1917 in poetry
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1917 poetry literature
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Events
right|thumb|The Egoist
January — Philosopher Hu Shih, the primary advocate for the revolution in Chinese literature at this time to replace scholarly language with the vernacular, publishes an article in the magazine New Youth (Xin Qingnian) titled "A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform", in which he originally emphasizes eight guidelines that all Chinese writers should take to heart (next year he will compress the list to four points).
February — The Little Review moves from Chicago to New York City with the help of Ezra Pound (its foreign editor from May).
May — W. B. Yeats acquires Thoor Ballylee in Ireland.
May 2 — English poet Marian Allen completes the poem "To A. T. G." a few days after hearing of the death in action of her fiancé Arthur Greg, the first of several to his memory.
May–June — T. S. Eliot takes over as editor of The Egoist, a London literary monthly, when Richard Aldington leaves for the British Army.
July
English poet Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" against prolongation of World War I and is sent (with assistance from Robert Graves) by the military authorities to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where on August 17 Wilfred Owen introduces himself. With his encouragement, Owen writes "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum est"; the latter work's horrifying imagery makes it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written. Like almost all Owen's poetry, these remain unpublished until after his death in action next year.
With the United States not yet fighting in World War I, Americans John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings and Robert Hillyer volunteer for the S.S.U. 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps.
Last issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, founded by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 and publishing poetry and other writing, as well as visual art; contributors include William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell and Lola Ridge.
thumb|Portrait of Siegfried Sassoon by Glyn Warren Philpot, 1917 (Fitzwilliam Museum)
July 15 — Welsh-language poet Hedd Wyn posts his awdl "Yr Arwr" ("The Hero") as his entry for the poetry competition at the National Eisteddfod of Wales on the same day as he marches off with the 15th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers towards the Battle of Passchendaele in which he will be killed a fortnight later. On September 6 at the ceremony of Chairing of the Bard at the Eisteddfod, held at Birkenhead, the empty druidical chair which Wyn, as winner, should have occupied is draped in a black sheet, "The festival in tears and the poet in his grave." This becomes known as "The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair."
Summer — Russian writer Boris Pasternak composes My Sister, My Life; this circulates orally and in manuscript for several years before publication.
c. Summer — The Siuru expressionistic and neo-romantic literary movement in Estonia is formed by a group of young poets and writers.Bédé, Jean Albert Edgerton, William Benbow Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature New York Columbia University Press 1980 0-231-03717-1 237 https://archive.org/details/columbiadictiona0000unse/page/237Rubulis, Aleksis Baltic Literature https://archive.org/details/balticliterature00rubu registration South Bend, Indiana University of Notre Dame Press 1970
October 20 — 51-year-old poet W. B. Yeats marries 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees at Harrow Road register office in London (with Ezra Pound as best man), a couple of months after having had a proposal of marriage to his ex-mistress's daughter, Iseult Gonne, rejected.
November — Publication of The Muse in Arms, an anthology of British war poetry.
Works published in English
Australia
Arthur Henry Adams, Australian Nursery Rimes, Australia
C. J. Dennis:
The Glugs of Gosh
Doreen
Henry Lawson, "Scots of the Riverina", Australia
United Kingdom
thumb|150px|right|Book by T. S. Eliot
Aftermath of Easter Week, Ireland
Rupert Brooke, Selected PoemsCox, Michael The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature Oxford University Press 2004 0-19-860634-6 registration https://archive.org/details/conciseoxfordchr00coxm
May Wedderburn Cannan, In War Time
Richard Church, The Flood of Life
Austin Clarke, The Vengeance of Fionn (Irish poet)
Walter de la Mare, The Sunken Garden, and Other Poems
John Drinkwater, Tides
T. S. Eliot:
Prufrock, and other observations
Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (criticism)
Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers
Ronald Gurner, War's Echo
Ivor Gurney, Severn and Somme
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), The Tribute And Circe: Two Poems (American poet published in the UK)
Thomas Hardy:
Collected Poems
Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous
F. W. Harvey, Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp
May Herschel-Clarke, Behind the Firing Line and other poems of the War
W. N. Hodgson, Verse and Prose in Peace and War (posthumous)
E. W. Hornung, Ballad of Ensign Joy
D. H. Lawrence, Look! We Have Come Through
Joseph Lee, Work-a-Day Warriors (Scottish poet)
Ewart Alan Mackintosh, A Highland Regiment and Other Poems (Scottish poet)
Frederic Manning, Ediola, a collection of poems influenced by Ezra Pound’s imagism
John Masefield, Lollingdon Downs, and Other Poems
Alice Meynell, A Father of Women, and Other Poems
A. Mellema, The Poems of a Canadian Woodman, Canadian Forestry Corps, No. 108 Coy. (Canadian poet published in Scotland)
Charles Murray, The Sough o' War (Scottish poet writing in Doric dialect)
George William Russell ("Æ"), Salutation
Vita Sackville-West, Poems of East and West
Siegfried Sassoon, The Old Huntsman, and Other Poems
Will Streets, The Undying Splendour (posthumous)
Edward Thomas, Poems (posthumous) (including "Adlestrop")
Sir William Watson, The Man Who Saw, and Other Poems Arising Out of the War
Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity
W. B. Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse (Irish poet)
United States
Conrad Aiken, Nocturne of Remembered SpringLudwig, Richard M., and Clifford A. Nault, Jr., Annals of American Literature: 1602–1983, 1986, New York: Oxford University Press ("If the title page is one year later than the copyright date, we used the latter since publishers frequently postdate books published near the end of the calendar year." — from the Preface, p vi)
John Peale Bishop, Green Fruit
Kate Buss es, Jevons BlockCatalogue of Copyright Entries, pg. 165.
Witter Bynner, Grenstone Poems
Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927), Pro Patria A 16-page pamphlet of seven war poems published privately in Philadelphia in support of American involvement in World War I.
Edgar A. Guest, Just Folks
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), The Tribute And Circe: Two Poems American poet published in the United Kingdom
Archibald MacLeish, Tower of Ivory
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems
James Oppenheim, The Book of Self
Edward Arlington Robinson, Merlin
George Murphy, Thirty-five Sonnets
Alan Seeger, Poems (posthumous)
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"Published in October 1917 by Alfred Kreymborg in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse and two months later in the December issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse. See Others: An Anthology of the New Verse on Internet Archive.
Sara Teasdale, Love Songs
William Carlos Williams, A Book of Poems: Al Que Quiere!
Other in English
Nizamat Jung, Sonnets, London: Erskine Macdonald; Indian, Indian poetry in English, published in the United KingdomVinayak Krishna Gokak, The Golden Treasury and Indo-Anglian Poetry (1828-1965), p 313, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi (1970, first edition; 2006 reprint), 81-260-1196-3, retrieved August 6, 2010
Sarojini Naidu, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring, London; India, Indian poetry in English, published in the United Kingdom
E. J. Pratt, Rachel: a sea story of Newfoundland, private."Bibliography," Selected Poems of E. J. Pratt, Peter Buitenhuis ed., Toronto: Macmillan, 1968, 207-208. Canada.
Works published in other languages
France
Guillaume Apollinaire, pen name of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, Vitam impendere amoriWeb page titled "Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 - 1918)" at the Poetry Foundation website, retrieved August 9, 2009. 2009-09-03.
Max Jacob, Le cornet a désAuster, Paul, editor, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry: with Translations by American and British Poets, New York: Random House, 1982 0-394-52197-8
Philippe Soupault, Aquarium
Paul Valéry, La Jeune ParquePreminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan, et al., The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993. New York: MJF Books/Fine Communications
Indian subcontinent
Including all of the British colonies that later became India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Listed alphabetically by first name, regardless of surname:
Balawantrai Thakore, Bhanakar, Gujarati languageMohan, Sarala Jag, Chapter 4: "Twentieth-Century Gujarati Literature" (Google books link), in Natarajan, Nalini, and Emanuel Sampath Nelson, editors, Handbook of Twentieth-century Literatures of India, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996, 978-0-313-28778-7, retrieved December 10, 2008
Ci. Subrahamaniya Bharati, Kannan Pattu, Tamil languageDas, Sisir Kumar and various, History of Indian Literature: 1911-1956: struggle for freedom: triumph and tragedy, Volume 2, 1995, published by Sahitya Akademi, 978-81-7201-798-9, retrieved via Google Books on December 23, 2008
C. R. Sahasrabuddha, Kakaduta, a parody (a book with the same name by a different author was published in 1940), Sanskrit language
Daulat Ram, Raja Gopi Cand, long narrative poem in the traditional genre of "Kissa", about the legend of Raja Gopi Chand, Punjabi language
Duvvuri Rami Reddi, Nalajaramma agnipravesamu, Telugu language
Hiteshwar Bar Barua, Desdimona Kavya, narrative poem inspired by Shakespeare's ' 'Othello' ', Assamese language
Hiteshwar Barua, Angila, Assamese language
Vallathol Narayana Menon, also known simply as "Vallathol", Sahityamanjari, Part I, Malayalam language
Other
Artur Adson, Henge palango, Estonia
Gottfried Benn, Fleisch, GermanyWeb page titled "Poet: Gottfried Benn", at Poetry Foundation website, retrieved December 16, 2009
António Botto, Trovas, Portugal
Albert Ehrenstein, Die rote Zeit, Germany
Walter Flex, Im Felde zwischen Nacht und Tag, Germany
Stefan George, Der Krieg ("The War"); German"Stefan George", article, Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2004, retrieved February 23, 2010
Ulric-L. Gingras, La chanson du paysans; French language;, CanadaStory, Noah, The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature, "Poetry in French" article, pp 651-654, Oxford University Press, 1967
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Diario de un poeta recién casado ("Diary of a Newly Married Poet"; later retitled Diario de poeta y mar ["Diary of Poet and Sea"), SpainDebicki, Andrew P., Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Beyond, pp 11 (Machado), 14 (Jimenez), University Press of Kentucky, 1995, 978-0-8131-0835-3, retrieved via Google Books, November 21, 2009
Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla ("Fields of Castile"), enlarged edition (first edition 1912); Spain
Julio Molina Núñez and Juan Agustín Araya. Selva lírica, preparada, anthology, including work by Gabriela Mistral; ChileWeb page titled "Gabriela Mistral/Cronologia 1889-1921" https://web.archive.org/web/20100820040905/http://cvc.cervantes.es/ACTCULT/mistral/cronologia/1889_1921.htm 2010-08-20 , at the Centro Virtual Cervantes website, retrieved September 22, 2010
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Il porto sepolto ("The Buried Port"), Italy
Henrik Visnapuu, Amores, Estonia
Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
March 1
Robert Lowell (died 1977), American poet
Fadwa Tuqan (died 2003), Palestinian poet
March 17 – Takis Sinopoulos (died 1981), Greek poet
April 9 – Johannes Bobrowski (died 1965), German lyric poet, fiction writer, adaptor and essayist
June 7 – Gwendolyn Brooks (died 2000), African American poet
June 30 – Judson Crews (died 2010), American poet
July 5 – Stella Sierra (died 1997), Panamanian poet
July 15 – Robert Conquest (died 2015), English-born historian and poet
August 9 – Jao Tsung-I (died 2018), Chinese scholar, poet, translator, calligrapher and painter
October 12 – James McAuley (died 1976), Australian poet
December 9 – James Jesus Angleton (died 1987), American counterintelligence agent and poet
December 14 – Tove Ditlevsen (suicide 1976), Danish poet and fiction writer
December 30 – Yun Dong-ju (died 1945), Korean poet (surname: Yoon; also spelled "Yoon Dong-joo" and "Yun Tong-ju")
Also:
Rainer Brambach (died 1983), German poetHofmann, Michael, editor, Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An Anthology, Macmillan/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Abdus Sattar Ranjoor Kashmiri (died 1990), Indian, Kashmiri-language poet
Kamakshi Prasad Chattopadhyay (died 1976), Indian, Bengali-language poet and fiction writer
P. N. Pushp (died 1998), Indian, Kashmiri-language scholar and poet
Mario Augusto Rodriguez Velez (died 2009), Panamanian journalist, essayist, dramatist, poet and storyteller (surname: Rodriguez Velez)"Panamanian writer Rodriguez Velez dies", article, January 11, 2009, United Press International website; also "Panama Writer Mario Augusto Rodriguez Dies" https://web.archive.org/web/20110719152124/http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=325228&CategoryId=14088 2011-07-19 , January 11, Latin American Herald Tribune, both retrieved same day
Sampath, pen name of Raghavacharya Sankhavaram, Indian, Telugu poet
Themis, Indian poet of the Aurobindoean School
Deaths
thumb|right|150px|Memorial to Francis Ledwidge on the spot where he died
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
January 30 – Marion Juliet Mitchell, 80 (born 1836), American poet and educator
April 7 – Susan Archer Weiss, 95 (born 1822), American poet
April 20? – Jane Barlow, 60 (born 1857), Irish poet and novelist
May 25 – Maksim Bahdanovič, 25 (born 1891), Belarusian poet, journalist and literary critic, of tuberculosis
May 29 – Kate Harrington, 85 (born 1831), American teacher, writer and poet
November 1 – Ismail Merathi (born 1844), Indian
Also: Madhavanuj, pen name of Kashinath Hari Modak (born 1871), Indian, Marathi-language poet and translator and physician
Killed in World War I
April 3 – Arthur Graeme West, English war poet and prose writer, shot by a sniper near Bapaume (born 1891)
April 9
Edward Thomas, British poet and prose writer, killed in action during the Battle of Arras, soon after his arrival in France (born 1878)
R. E. Vernède, English war poet, died after being wounded by machine gun fire while leading an advance at Havrincourt (born 1875)
July 31 – both killed in the Battle of Passchendaele near Ypres, Belgium
Francis Ledwidge, Irish war poet, "poet of the blackbirds" (born 1887)
Hedd Wyn, Welsh-language poet, killed while serving with 15th Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers at Pilckem Ridge (born 1887)
September 17 – Arthur Sidgwick, English poet and essayist, died of wounds from aerial bomb near Ypres (born 1882)
September 28 – T. E. Hulme, influential English poetry critic, killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke in Flanders Fields (born 1883)
October 16 – Walter Flex, German war writer, died of wounds in Estonia (born 1887)
November 23 – Ewart Alan Mackintosh, Scottish war poet, killed in the Battle of Cambrai (born 1893)
Awards and honors
Nobel Prize for Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, a Danish poet and novelist, shares the award with fellow Dane Henrik Pontoppidan
See also
Poetry
List of years in poetry
Dada
Imagism
Modernist poetry in English
Silver Age of Russian Poetry
Ego-Futurism movement in Russian poetry
Expressionism movement in German poetry
Young Poland (Polish: Młoda Polska) modernist period in Polish arts and literature
Poetry
Notes
Category:20th-century poetry
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