1946 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France). March – Japanese poet Sadako Kurihara's "Bringing Forth New Life" (生ましめんかな, Umashimen-kana) is published. Publication this year of her first collection, The Black Egg (Kuroi tamago), is permitted during the occupation of Japan only in abridged form because of its treatment of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima experienced by the poet. May 20 – W. H. Auden becomes a United States citizen. Ezra Pound is brought back to the United States on treason charges but found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remains for 12 years (to 1958). Upon learning about Isaiah Berlin's visit to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova this year, Joseph Stalin's associate Andrei Zhdanov, with the approval of the Soviet Central Committee, issues the "Zhdanov decree" denouncing her as a "half harlot, half nun", and has her poems banned from publication. This resolution is directed against two literary magazines, Zvezda and Leningrad, which have published supposedly apolitical, "bourgeois", individualistic works of Akhmatova and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. In time Akhmatova's son will spend his youth in Stalinist gulags and she will resort to publishing several poems in praise of Stalin to secure his release. Takashi Matsumoto founds a literary magazine, Fue ("Flute") in Japan. Martin Starkie founds Oxford University Poetry Society in Oxford, England. Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco, first published this year, invents the name "MacSpaunday" to designate a composite figure made up of the poets Louis MacNeice ("Mac") Stephen Spender ("sp") W. H. Auden ("au-n") Cecil Day-Lewis ("day") Campbell, in common with much literary journalism of the period, imagines the four as a group of like-minded poets, although they share little but very broadly left-wing views. Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately: Louis Dudek.