1962 in Poetry - Events

Events

• Writers in the Soviet Union this year were allowed to publish criticism of Joseph Stalin and were given more freedom generally, although many were severely criticized for doing so. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in the poem, The Heirs of Stalin, wrote that more guards should be placed at Stalin's tomb, "lest Stalin rise again, and with Stalin the past". He also condemns anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. His poetry readings attracted hundreds and thousands of enthusiastic young people, to the point where police were often summoned to preserve order and disperse the crowds long after midnight. Other young poets also went beyond the previous limits of Soviet censorship: Andrei Voznesensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Bella Akhmadulina (who had divorced Yevtushenko). Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of the literary monthly New World, supported many of the young writers. By the end of the year, the young writers had gained power in the official writers' unions which controlled much of the literary culture of the Soviet Union, and some publications which had attacked them were printing their work.
• American poet Robert Frost visits Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in her dacha
• Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath separate
• Michigan Quarterly Review is founded.
• October — Dame Edith Sitwell read from her poetry at a concert at Royal Festival Hall in London given in honor of her 75th birthday.
• Composer Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, included settings for Wilfred Owen's poems