1913 in Poetry - Events

Events

• January 8 – Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London. American poets Robert Frost and Ezra Pound will eventually meet there.
• Ezra Pound travels to London to meet W. B. Yeats, whom he considers "the only poet worthy of serious study"; from that year until 1916, the two men winter in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as secretary to the older poet.
• January and March – Three poems of Hilda Doolittle appear in the January issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, submitted by Ezra Pound, the magazine's "foreign editor" and a close associate of Doolittle. The March 1913 issue of the magazine also contained Pound's "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" and F. S. Flint's essay Imagisme. This publication history means that this London-based movement has its first readership in the United States.
• The New Freewoman, a literary magazine, begins publication in June but becomes defunct in December. Dora Marsden owns it; Rebecca West edits it at first, then Ezra Pound takes over as editor; it succeeds The Freewoman and will be succeeded by The Egoist.
• Founding of The Glebe a literary magazine edited by Alfred Kreymborg and Man Ray; it will cease publication in 1914 after 10 issues.
• Ezra Pound, having heard about The Glebe from Kreymborg's friend John Cournos, sends Kreymborg the manuscript of Des Imagistes in the summer and this famous first anthology of Imagism is published as the fifth issue of The Glebe.
• W. B. Yeats' poem "September 1913" is published in The Irish Times during the Dublin Lock-out.

• Jose Martínez Ruiz, commonly known as Azorín, comes up with the name "Generation of '98" this year, referring to the novelists, poets, essayists, and philosophers active in Spain at the time of the Spanish-American War (1898 and alluding to the moral, political, and social crisis produced by Spain's defeat in that war. Writing mostly after 1910, the group reinvigorates Spanish letters, revives literary myths and breaks with classical schemes of literary genres. In politics, members of the movement often justify radicalism and rebellion.
• Wallace Stevens and his wife, Elsie, rent a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph Weinman, who makes a bust of Elsie, whose image later is used on the artist's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design.
• November 14 — Rabindranath Tagore is awarded the Nobel prize in literature.