1959 in Poetry - Events

Events

• March — at a dinner celebrating Robert Frost's 85th birthday, the critic Lionel Trilling gives some brief remarks about Frost's poetry and "permanently changed the way people think about his subject", according to critic Adam Kirsch. Trilling says that Frost had been long viewed as a folksy, unobjectionable poet, "an articulate Bald Eagle" who gave readers comfortable truths in traditional meter and New England dialect in such schoolbook favorites such as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken"; but was instead was "a terrifying poet" not so much like Longfellow as Sophocles, "who made plain ... the terrible things of human life." Trilling is severely criticized at the time, but his view will become widely accepted in the following decades.
• May 18–24 — Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Union, head of state, in an extemporaneous speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers, calls for indulgence towards "deviationist" writers. At the same conference, the poet Alexis Surkov again condemns writing "hostile to socialist realism and denounces fellow poet Boris Pasternak as acting in a way that is "trecherous and unworthy of a Soviet writer". A liberalizing trend in the state's treatment of its writers is evident. Surkov, the subject of intense criticism himself, resigned from the congress, and at some point in the year attacks against Pasternak ceased.
• December – "The Poetry Society" episode of Hancock's Half Hour is broadcast on BBC radio, satirizing artistic pretensions.
• In the United States, "Those serious new Bohemians, the beatniks, occupied with reading their deliberately undisciplined, protesting verse in night clubs and hotel ballrooms, created more publicity than poetry", wrote Harrison M. Hayford, an academic at Northwestern University. "Meanwhile back on the campus, the 'square' poets were turning more and more to a controlled verse, much of it good enough to survive the pointed charge of academicism." Non-beat, off-campus poets almost routinely displayed "simple competence in the handling of complex forms", he wrote in Encyclopædia Britannica's Britannica Book of the Year 1960, which covered 1959.
• Literary critic M.L. Rosenthal coins the term "confessional" as used in Confessional poetry in "Poetry as Confession", an article appearing in the September 19 issue of The Nation. Rosenthal's article reviewed the poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell. The review was later collected in Rosenthal's book of selected essays and reviews, Our Life In Poetry, published in 1991
• The chairmanship of The Group, a grouping of British poets, passes to Edward Lucie-Smith this year when Philip Hobsbaum left London to study in Sheffield. The meetings continue at his house in Chelsea, and the circle of poets expands to include Fleur Adcock, Taner Baybars, Edwin Brock, and Zulfikar Ghose; others including Nathaniel Tarn circulate poems for comment.
• Carl Sandburg, poet and historian, lectures at the U.S. fair and exposition in Moscow.
• After twenty years, John Crowe Ransom steps down as editor of The Kenyon Review, which he founded.
• The journal Canadian Literature is founded by George Woodcock at the University of British Columbia.
• The British poetry magazine Agenda is founded by William Cookson and Ezra Pound.
• Aldous Huxley turns down the offer of a knighthood.
• In France, the centenary of the death of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore is commemorated.