1941 in Poetry - Events

Events

• September 3 — 19-year-old John Gillespie Magee, Jr., American poet and aviator, flew a high-altitude test flight in a Spitfire V and afterwards wrote "High Flight" about the experience, on December 11 he dies while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he had joined before the United States had officially entered World War II
• The Antioch Review founded
• Basil Bunting joins the RAF and is eventually sent to Iran as an intelligence officer and a translator during World War II.
• December — In siege-bound Leningrad, Yakov Druskin, ill and starving, and Maria Malich, the second wife of Danil Kharms, trudge across the city to Kharms' bombed-out apartment building and collect a trunk full of manuscripts. They hide the manuscripts through the 1940s and 1950s, even bringing them to Siberia, then covertly show them to others in the 1960s. Their actions save much of Kharms' work for posterity as well as that of fellow poet Alexander Vvedensky (of whom only about a quarter of his output survives)
• Under the Nazi occupation beginning in June 1941, Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was among the Polish Jews interned in the Vilna Ghetto. He would escape and join the resistance in 1943. During the Nazi era, Sutzkever wrote over 80 poems, whose manuscripts he managed to save for postwar publication.
• Ezra Pound applies to return to the United States but is refused. He begins appearing on Rome Radio, making statements against the Allies.
• The magazine VVV founded in New York City by French poet André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and David Hare