1945 in Poetry - Events

Events

• March 4 — Pablo Neruda elected a Communist party senator in Chile. He officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
• April — Ilona Karmel and Henia Karmel, sisters from the Kraków Ghetto and together Polish Jewish prisoners of the Nazis, are on a forced death march when Germans in tanks crush them and then shove them, still living, into a mass grave. Soon after, a group of prisoners passes them, including a cousin of theirs. From their hiding place in her clothes, Henia Karmel rips out some poems she and her sister had written and hands them to her cousin to give to her husband, Leon, back in Kraków. The cousin delivers the poems, and the sisters are saved by a nearby farmer who takes them to a hospital. Henia writes in 1947, "these poems are real, not just scribblings. came about when I was still creating myself, experiencing the pain of separation. How I could have survived, you might ask? If so, sir, you know nothing of life. It lasted, that’s all." Henia writes in her poem, "Snapshots": "My name is Number 906. / And guess what? I still write verse."
• May 2, 1945, Ezra Pound is arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turns himself in to U.S. forces. He is incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. While in the camp he drafts the Pisan Cantos, a section of the work in progress which marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos wins the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948.
• June — Australia's most celebrated literary hoax takes place when Angry Penguins is published with poems by the fictional Ern Malley. Poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the poems from lines of other poems and then sent them as the purported work of a recently deceased poet. The hoax is played on Max Harris, then a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had started the modernist magazine, Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle of literary friends agreed that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great merit had come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition of the magazine with the poems comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays. An Australian newspaper uncovers the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart loved early Modernist poets but despise later modernism and especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and are jealous of Harris's precocious success.
• June 7 — Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, based on George Crabbe's The Borough, is first performed.
• Two small Canadian literary magazines, Preview and First Statement (each founded separately in 1942) combine to form Northern Review (which lasts until 1956).
• Kyk-over-al magazine founded in Guyana
• Vladimir Nabokov becomes a naturalized citizen of the United States.