Events
- January 1 – Cecil Day-Lewis is announced as the new Poet Laureate of the UK.
- November 23 – Roy Fuller is elected professor of poetry at Oxford University (with 385 votes) to succeed Edmund Blunden, who unexpectedly left. Other nominees were Kathleen Raine, Enid Starkie and Yevgeni Yevtushenko.
- The Belfast Group, a grouping of poets in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which was started in 1963 in poetry and lapsed in 1966 when founder Philip Hobsbaum left for Glasgow, is reconstituted this year by Michael Allen, Arthur Terry, and Seamus Heaney. At various times, the group also includes Michael Longley, James Simmons, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty and the critic Edna Longley. Meetings are held at Seamus and Marie Heaney's house on Ashley Avenue. The group will last until 1972.
- The Honest Ulsterman, a long-running Northern Ireland literary magazine, is established this year by James Simmons. It is then edited for 20 years by Frank Ormsby.
Read more about this topic: 1968 In Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)