Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
January – English literary magazine Horizon is first published in London by Cyril Connolly, Peter Watson and Stephen Spender
July 26 – Release of the movie adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with English poet and writer Aldous Huxley as a screenwriter
English poet Basil Bunting joins the Royal Air Force and is eventually sent to Iran as an intelligence officer and translator
Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's collection From Six Books is published in the Soviet Union but publication is suspended shortly after release, copies pulped and remaining issues prohibited
American poet Louis Zukofsky finishes the first half of "A"
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; works listed again if substantially revised:
Mohendra Nath Dutt, Kurukshetra ( Poetry in English ), an epic; Calcutta: P. M. Mukherji
P. R. Kaikini, The Recruit ( Poetry in English ), Bombay: New Book Co.
Manjeri Sundaraman, Catguts ( Poetry in English ), Madras: Hurley Press
A. M. Klein, Hath Not a Jew.
E. J. Pratt, Brebeuf and his Brethren, Toronto: Macmillan, 1940. Detroit: Basilian Press, 1942. Governor General's Award 1940.
W. H. Auden, English poet living at this time in the United States:
Another Time, including "September 1, 1939"
Some Poems
John Betjeman, Old Lights for New Chancels
Edmund Blunden, Poems 1930–1940
R. N. Currey, Tiresias
Cecil Day-Lewis:
translation, The Georgics of Virgil (see also his translations of The Aeneid of Virgil 1952 and The Eclogues of Virgil 1963)
Poems in Wartime
T. S. Eliot:
The Waste Land, and Other Poems, The Waste Land first published in 1923
East Coker, published in The New English Weekly, Easter Number; published in book form in June; republished in Four Quartets 1944
William Empson, The Gathering Storm
Roy Fuller, Poems
Robert Garioch (pen name of Robert Garioch Sutherland) and Sorley MacLean (also known as Somhairle MacGill-Eain}, 17 Poems for 6d.