1917 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Events

January — Philosopher Hu Shih, the primary advocate for the revolution in Chinese literature at this time to replace scholarly language with the vernacular, publishes an article in the magazine New Youth (Xin Qingnian) titled "A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform", in which he originally emphasizes eight guidelines that all Chinese writers should take to heart.
February — The Little Review moves from Chicago to New York City with the help of Ezra Pound.
May — W. B. Yeats acquires Thoor Ballylee in Ireland.
May 2 — English poet Marian Allen completes the poem "To A. T. G." a few days after hearing of the death in action of her fiancé Arthur Greg, the first of several to his memory.
May-June — T. S. Eliot takes over as editor of The Egoist, a London literary monthly, when Richard Aldington leaves for the British Army.
July
* English poet Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" against prolongation of World War I and is sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where on August 17 Wilfred Owen introduces himself. With his encouragement, Owen writes "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum est"; the latter work's horrifying imagery makes it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written. Like almost all Owen's poetry, these remain unpublished until after his death in action next year.
* With the United States not yet fighting in World War I, Americans John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings and Robert Hillyer volunteer for the S.S.U. 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps.
* Last issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, founded by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915 and publishing poetry and other writing, as well as visual art; contributors include William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell and Lola Ridge.
July 15 — Welsh-language poet Hedd Wyn posts his awdl "Yr Arwr" as his entry for the poetry competition at the National Eisteddfod of Wales on the same day as he marches off with the 15th Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers towards the Battle of Passchendaele in which he will be killed a fortnight later. On September 6 at the ceremony of Chairing of the Bard at the Eisteddfod, held at Birkenhead, the empty druidical chair which Wyn, as winner, should have occupied is draped in a black sheet, "The festival in tears and the poet in his grave." This becomes known as "The Eisteddfod of the Black Chair."
Summer — Russian writer Boris Pasternak composes My Sister, My Life; this circulates orally and in manuscript for several years before publication.
c. Summer — The Siuru expressionistic and neo-romantic literary movement in Estonia is formed by a group of young poets and writers.
October 20 — 51-year-old poet W. B. Yeats marries 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees at Harrow Road register office in London, a couple of months after having had a proposal of marriage to his ex-mistress's daughter, Iseult Gonne, rejected.
November — Publication of The Muse in Arms, an anthology of British war poetry.

Works published in English

Australia">Australian poetry">Australia

Arthur Henry Adams, Australian Nursery Rimes, Australia
C. J. Dennis:
* The Glugs of Gosh
* Doreen
Henry Lawson, "Scots of the Riverina", Australia

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

Aftermath of Easter Week, Ireland

Rupert Brooke, Selected Poems
May Wedderburn Cannan, In War Time
Richard Church, The Flood of Life
Austin Clarke, The Vengeance of Fionn
Walter de la Mare, The Sunken Garden, and Other Poems
John Drinkwater, Tides
T. S. Eliot:
* Prufrock, and other observations
* Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry
Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers
Ronald Gurner, War's Echo
Ivor Gurney, Severn and Somme
H.D., The Tribute And Circe: Two Poems
Thomas Hardy:
* Collected Poems
* Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous
F. W. Harvey, Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp
May Herschel-Clarke, Behind the Firing Line and other poems of the War
W. N. Hodgson, Verse and Prose in Peace and War
D. H. Lawrence, Look! We Have Come Through
Joseph Lee, Work-a-Day Warriors
Ewart Alan Mackintosh, A Highland Regiment and Other Poems
Frederic Manning, Ediola, a collection of poems influenced by Ezra Pound’s imagism
John Masefield, Lollingdon Downs, and Other Poems
Alice Meynell, A Father of Women, and Other Poems
A. Mellema, The Poems of a Canadian Woodman, Canadian Forestry Corps, No. 108 Coy.
Charles Murray, The Sough o' War
George William Russell, Salutation
Vita Sackville-West, Poems of East and West
Siegfried Sassoon, The Old Huntsman, and Other Poems
Will Streets, The Undying Splendour
Edward Thomas, Poems
Sir William Watson, The Man Who Saw, and Other Poems Arising Out of the War
Charles Williams, Poems of Conformity
W. B. Yeats, ''The Wild Swans at Coole, Other Verses and a Play in Verse''

United States">American poetry">United States

Conrad Aiken, Nocturne of Remembered Spring
John Peale Bishop, Green Fruit
, Jevons Block
Witter Bynner, Grenstone Poems
Florence Earle Coates, Pro Patria A 16-page pamphlet of seven war poems published privately in Philadelphia in support of American involvement in World War I.
Edgar A. Guest, Just Folks
H.D., The Tribute And Circe: Two Poems American poet published in the United Kingdom
Archibald MacLeish, Tower of Ivory
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems
James Oppenheim, The Book of Self
Edward Arlington Robinson, Merlin
George Murphy, Thirty-five Sonnets
Alan Seeger, Poems
Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Sara Teasdale, Love Songs
William Carlos Williams, ''A Book of Poems: Al Que Quiere!''

Other in English

Nizamat Jung, Sonnets, London: Erskine Macdonald; Indian, Indian poetry in English, published in the United Kingdom
Sarojini Naidu, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring, London; India, Indian poetry in English, published in the United Kingdom
E. J. Pratt, Rachel: a sea story of Newfoundland, private. Canada.

Works published in other languages

France">French poetry">France

Guillaume Apollinaire, pen name of Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky, Vitam impendere amori
Max Jacob, Le cornet a dés
Philippe Soupault, Aquarium
Paul Valéry, ''La Jeune Parque''

Indian">Indian poetry">Indian subcontinent

Including all of the British colonies that later became India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Listed alphabetically by first name, regardless of surname:

Balawantrai Thakore, Bhanakar, Gujarati language
Ci. Subrahamaniya Bharati, Kannan Pattu, Tamil language
C. R. Sahasrabuddha, Kakaduta, a parody, Sanskrit language
Daulat Ram, Raja Gopi Cand, long narrative poem in the traditional genre of "Kissa", about the legend of Raja Gopi Chand, Punjabi language
Duvvuri Rami Reddi, Nalajaramma agnipravesamu, Telugu language
Hiteshwar Bar Barua, Desdimona Kavya, narrative poem inspired by Shakespeare's ' 'Othello' ', Assamese language
Hiteshwar Barua, Angila, Assamese language
Vallathol Narayana Menon, also known simply as "Vallathol", Sahityamanjari, Part I, Malayalam language

Other

Artur Adson, Henge palango, Estonia
Gottfried Benn, Fleisch, Germany
António Botto, Trovas, Portugal
Albert Ehrenstein, Die rote Zeit, Germany
Walter Flex, Im Felde zwischen Nacht und Tag, Germany
Stefan George, Der Krieg ; German
Ulric-L. Gingras, La chanson du paysans; French language;, Canada
Juan Ramón Jiménez, Diario de un poeta recién casado, Spain
Antonio Machado, Campos de Castilla, enlarged edition ; Spain
Julio Molina Núñez and Juan Agustín Araya. Selva lírica, preparada, anthology, including work by Gabriela Mistral; Chile
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Il porto sepolto, Italy
Henrik Visnapuu, Amores, Estonia

Births

Death years link to the corresponding " in poetry" article:

March 1 - Robert Lowell, American poet
March 17 - Takis Sinopoulos, Greek poet
April 9 - Johannes Bobrowski, German lyric poet, fiction writer, adaptor and essayist
June 7 - Gwendolyn Brooks, African American poet
June 30 - Judson Crews, American poet
July 5 - Stella Sierra, Panamanian poet
July 15 - Robert Conquest, English-born historian and poet
August 9 - Jao Tsung-I, Chinese scholar, poet, translator, calligrapher and painter
October 12 - James McAuley, Australian poet
December 9 - James Jesus Angleton, American counterintelligence agent and poet
December 14 - Tove Ditlevsen, Danish poet and fiction writer
December 30 - Yun Dong-ju, Korean poet
Also:
* Rainer Brambach, German poet
* Abdus Sattar Ranjoor Kashmiri, Indian, Kashmiri-language poet
* Kamakshi Prasad Chattopadhyay, Indian, Bengali-language poet and fiction writer
* P. N. Pushp, Indian, Kashmiri-language scholar and poet
* Mario Augusto Rodriguez Velez, Panamanian journalist, essayist, dramatist, poet and storyteller
* Sampath, pen name of Raghavacharya Sankhavaram, Indian, Telugu poet
* Themis, Indian poet of the Aurobindoean School
* Fadwa Tuqan, Palestinian poet

Deaths

Birth years link to the corresponding " in poetry" article:

January 30 - Marion Juliet Mitchell, 80, American poet and educator
April 7 - Susan Archer Weiss, 95, American poet
April 20? - Jane Barlow, 60, Irish poet and novelist
May 25 - Maksim Bahdanovič, 25, Belarusian poet, journalist and literary critic, of tuberculosis
May 29 - Kate Harrington, 85, American teacher, writer and poet
Also:
* Madhavanuj, pen name of Kashinath Hari Modak, Indian, Marathi-language poet and translator; a physician
* Ismail Merathi, Indian

Killed in World War I

April 3 - Arthur Graeme West, English war poet and prose writer, shot by a sniper near Bapaume
April 9
* Edward Thomas, British poet and prose writer, killed in action during the Battle of Arras, soon after his arrival in France
* R. E. Vernède, English war poet, died after being wounded by machine gun fire while leading an advance at Havrincourt
July 31 - both killed in the Battle of Passchendaele near Ypres, Belgium
* Francis Ledwidge, Irish war poet, "poet of the blackbirds"
* Hedd Wyn, Welsh-language poet, killed while serving with 15th Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers at Pilckem Ridge
September 17 - Arthur Sidgwick, English poet and essayist, died of wounds from aerial bomb near Ypres
September 28 - T. E. Hulme, influential English poetry critic, killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke in Flanders Fields
October 16 - Walter Flex, German war writer, died of wounds in Estonia
November 23 - Ewart Alan Mackintosh, Scottish war poet, killed in the Battle of Cambrai

Awards and honors

Nobel Prize for Literature: Karl Adolph Gjellerup, a Danish poet and novelist, shares the award with fellow Dane Henrik Pontoppidan