In the United States, "Those serious new Bohemians, the beatniks, occupied with reading their deliberately undisciplined, protesting verse in night clubs and hotel ballrooms, created more publicity than poetry", wrote Harrison M. Hayford, an academic at Northwestern University. "Meanwhile back on the campus, the 'square' poets were turning more and more to a controlled verse, much of it good enough to survive the pointed charge of academicism." Non-beat, off-campus poets almost routinely displayed "simple competence in the handling of complex forms", he wrote in Encyclopaedia Britannica's Britannica Book of the Year 1960, which covered 1959.[1]
March — at a dinner celebrating Robert Frost's 85th birthday, the critic Lionel Trilling gave some brief remarks about Frost's poetry and "permanently changed the way people think about his subject", according to critic Adam Kirsch. Trilling said that Frost, had been long viewed as a folksy, unobjectionable poet, "an articulate Bald Eagle" who gave readers comfortable truths in traditional meter and New England dialect in such schoolbook favorites such as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken". But the critic said Frost instead was "a terrifying poet" not so much like Longfellow as Sophocles, "who made plain ... the terrible things of human life." Trilling was severely criticized at the time, but his view would become widely accepted in the following decades.[2]
May 18-24 — Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Union, head of state, in an extemporaneous speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers, calls for indulgence towards "deviationist" writers. At the same conference, the poet Alexis Surkov again condemns writing "hostile to socialist realism and denounces fellow poet Boris Pasternak as acting in a way that is "trecherous and unworthy of a Soviet writer". A liberalizing trend in the state's treatment of its writers is evident. Surkov, the subject of intense criticism himself, resigned from the congress, and at some point in the year attacks against Pasternak ceased.[1]
Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, New York: New Directions[5]
Robert Lowell, Life Studies, a book on his family and on his own life[1] that reflected stylistic changes that seemed more in line with the popular openness of Beat and Confessional poetry
James Merrill, The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, and Other Poems"[1]
Gabriel Celaya, Cantata en Aleixandre, verse variations on themes of Vicente Aleixandre, published as a book by the literary magazine Papeles de sSon Armadans[1]
↑ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRTSUVWXYZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZBritannica Book of the Year 1960, covering events of 1959, published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1960; including these articles: "American Literature", "Canadian Literature", English Literature", "French Literature", "German Literature", "Jewish Literature", "Italian Literature", "Latin American Literature", "Obituaries", "Spanish Literature" and "Soviet Literature"
↑ Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan, et al., editors, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993, Princeton University Press and MJF Books, "Canadian Poetry" article, English "Anthologies" section, p 164
↑ abcdefghijM. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, "Selected Bibliography: Individual Volumes by Poets Discussed", pp 334-340
↑ Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan, et al., editors, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993, Princeton University Press and MJF Books, "New Zealand Poetry" article, "History and Criticism" section, p 837
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