Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Spring – August Derleth launches the poetry magazine Hawk and Whippoorwill in the United States.
September 5 – Welsh poet Waldo Williams is imprisoned for six weeks for non-payment of income tax (a protest against defence spending).
An inscription of an excerpt of the Poema de Fernán González is discovered on a roofing tile in Merindad de Sotoscueva, the earliest known record of it.
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:
Margaret Avison, Winter Sun
Daryl Hine, The Devil's Picture Book
Kenneth McRobbie, Eyes Without a Face
Eli Mandel, Fuseli Poems
Peter Miller, Sonata for Frog and Man
Edmund Snow Carpenter, American anthropologist, editor, Anerca, anonymous Eskimo poems, with drawings by Enooesweetok
A. J. M. Smith, editor, The Oxford book of Canadian verse, in English and French, including untranslated poems in French combined in chronological order with English-language poems
Nissim Ezekiel, The Unfinished Man: Poems Written in 1959, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Dom Moraes, John Nobody, Indian at this time living in the United Kingdom
Deb Kumar Das, The Night before Us, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Pradip Sen, And Then the Sun, first edition (revised edition, 1968), Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Raul De Loyola Furtado, The Oleanders and Other Poems, Calcutta: Writers Workshop, India
Keshav Malik, The Rippled Shadow
Barjor Paymaster, the Last Farewell and Other Poems, Bombay: Asia Publishing House
V. Madhusudan Reddy, Sapphires of Solitude, Hyderabad: V. Man Mohan Reddy
Sasthi Brata, Eleven Poems, Calcutta: published by the author
W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio
Sir John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
Edwin Bronk, A Family Affair, Northwood, Middlesex: Scorpion Press
Austin Clarke, The Hore-Eaters (see also Ancient Lights 1955, Too Great a Vine 1957)
Patric Dickinson, The World I See
Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems
D.