Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
June 4 — Joseph Brodsky is expelled from the Soviet Union.
May 22 — Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, dies at Lemmons, the home of writers Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard on the northern edge of London.
Autumn — The first threnody attributed to E. J. Thribb (actually written by Barry Fantoni and colleagues) is published in the English satirical magazine Private Eye.
October 10 — Sir John Betjeman is appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
November — The American Poetry Review founded by Stephen Berg in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
W. H. Auden, now a U.S. citizen, declares his New York neighborhood is too dangerous and returns to Oxford from the United States for the winter.
The Belfast Group, a discussion group of poets in Northern Ireland, goes out of existence this year. The group was started by Philip Hobsbaum when he moved to Belfast in 1963 and which included Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, James Simmons, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty and the critics Edna Longley and Michael Allen. Heaney moves from Belfast to work in Dublin and live in County Wicklow.
James K. Baxter, one of New Zealand's best-known poets, writes two original poems on the wallpaper of a room in the home of painter Michael Illingworth and his wife Dene. Soon after, Baxter dies. In 1973, after Baxter's death, the Illingworths remove the sections of wallpaper containing the poems and send them to the Hocken Library to be stored with Baxter's other papers.
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:
Anne Elder, For the Record
A.D. Hope, Collected Poems
Les Murray, Poems Against Economics
Earle Birney, Judith Copithorne, Andrew Suknaski, bill bissett, Four Parts Sand a selection of works by these concrete poets
Leonard Cohen, The Energy of Slaves
David Helwig, The Best Name of Silence
George Johnston, Happy Enough: Poems 1935–1972.