1946 in Poetry - Events

Events

  • W. H. Auden becomes a U.S. citizen
  • Ezra Pound brought back to the United States on treason charges, but found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years (to 1958).
  • Upon learning about Isaiah Berlin's visit to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova this year, Joseph Stalin's associate Andrei Zhdanov, with the approval of the Soviet Central Committee, issued the "Zhdanov decree" denouncing her as a "half harlot, half nun", and had her poems banned from publication. The 1946 resolution of the Central Committee was directed against two literary magazines, Zvezda and Leningrad, which had published supposedly apolitical, "bourgeois", individualistic works of Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. In time Akhmatova's son would spend his youth in Stalinist gulags, and she would resort to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release.
  • Takashi Matsumoto founds a literary magazine, Fue ("Flute") in Japan

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