1917 in poetry

Events

• 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 New Youth magazine titled ""A Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform", in which he originally emphasized eight guidelines that all Chinese writers should take to heart (next year he will compress the list to four points).
• Wilfred Owen, a soldier in World War I, writes Dulce et Decorum Est (published posthumously in 1921). The work's horrifying imagery later made it one of the most popular condemnations of war ever written.
• Siegfried Sassoon issues his "Soldier's Declaration" and is sent by the military authorities to Craiglockhart Military Hospital in Edinburgh, where he meets Wilfred Owen.
• July — 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 included: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle, Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, and Lola Ridge
• July — 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.
• T. S. Eliot takes over as editor of The Egoist, a London literary monthly, when Richard Aldington leaves for the British Army
• The Little Review moves from Chicago to New York City with the help of Ezra Pound

Works published

• Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), The Tribute And Circe: Two Poems
• T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations
• Robert Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers
• William Carlos Williams, Al Que Quiere
• William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole
• Some Imagist Poets third and final anthology; this effectively marks the end of the Imagist movement

Births

• March 1 - Robert Lowell, American
• April 19 — Johannes Bobrowski (died 1965), German poet, narrative writer, adaptor and essayist
• October 12 — James McAuley (dies 1976), Australian poet
• Date not known:
• Takis Sinopoulos, Greek
• Rainer Brambach (died 1983), German

Deaths

• April 9 — Edward Thomas, poet and prose writer
• May 25 — Maksim Bahdanovič, 25, Belarusian poet, journalist and literary critic, of tuberculosis.
• July 31 — Hedd Wyn, Welsh-language poet

Killed in World War I

• July 31 — Francis Ledwidge, 25, Irish war poet
• September 28 — T. E. Hulme, 30, influential English poetry critic
• date not known — R. E. Vernède, war poet

Awards and honors

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

Notes