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
Read more about this topic: 1962 In Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.
Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)