1948 in poetry

	This is part of the List of years in poetry
Years in poetry:	1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951
Years in literature:	1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951
Decades in poetry:	1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1960s 1970s 1980s
Centuries in poetry:	19th century 20th century 21st century
Centuries:	19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades:	1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1960s 1970s 1980s
Years:	1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951

[edit] Events

Sometime this year, Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation to describe his friends and as a general term describing the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York at that time to the novelist John Clellon Holmes
September — The body of William Butler Yeats who died in Menton, France in 1939, is moved from its original burial place Roquebrune-Cap-Martin to Drumcliffe, County Sligo, in accordance with his last wish. The Irish Naval Service corvette L.E. Macha carried the remains. Yeats' grave is a famous attraction in Sligo.
Di Goldene Keyt, an Israeli literary quarterly, founded
The Bollingen Prize is established by Paul Mellon, and was funded by a $10,000 grant from the Bollingen Foundation to the Library of Congress.

James K. Baxter, Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness, New Zealand
John Berryman, The Dispossessed (New York: William Sloan Associates)
Sir John Betjeman, Selected Poems
Charles Brasch: Disputed Ground: Poems 1939-45, Christchurch: Caxton Press, New Zealand^[1]
Lawrence Durrell, On Seeming to Presume
T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
Robert Graves, The White Goddess, a "historical grammar" of poetic myth and inspiration
John Heath-Stubbs, The Swarming of the Bees
Randall Jarrell, Losses
Olga Kirsch, Mure van die Hart, Afrikaans
William Meredith, Ships and Other Figures
Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos
Derek Walcott, 25 Poems
William Carlos Williams:
- Paterson, Book II
- Clouds, Aigeltinger, Russia

A. Norman Jeffares, W.B. Yeats: Man And Poet, United Kingdom, biography, revised in 1978^[2]
Richard Ellmann, Yeats, The Man And The Mask, United States, biography^[2]

January 31 — Albert Goldbarth
March 5 — Leslie Marmon Silko, Native American writer, a figure in what has been called the Native American Renaissance
April 6 — Anna Couani, Australian poet and teacher
May 24 — Lorna Crozier, Canadian poet
May 29 — David Waltner-Toews, Canadian poet, writer, veterinary epidemiologist
August 1 — Frank Stanford (died 1978), American poet
September 18 — Barrett Watten an American poet
October 7 — Diane Ackerman an American author, poet, and naturalist
October 18 — Ntozake Shange (pronounced En-toe-ZAHK-kay SHONG-gay) née Paulette Williams, an African American playwright, performance artist, writer and poet
date not known:
- R. S. Gwynn, American poet and anthologist associated with New Formalism
- Lawrence Joseph, American poet, writer, essayist, critic, lawyer, and law professor
- Brian Henderson (writer)
- Yitzhak Laor, Israeli poet, author, and journalist
- David Lehman, series editor for The Best American Poetry book series and American poet
- Anna Mioduchowska
- John Oughton
- Sherod Santos
- Heather McHugh
- Frank Stanford, American poet (died 1978)

Andrei Zhdanov, persecutor of poets

May 22 — Claude McKay, Jamaican writer, humanist, Communist, and part of the Harlem Renaissance
August 31 — Andrei Zhdanov, 52, Soviet government official and persecutor of poets, writers and artists; until the late 1950s, Zhdanovism, defined cultural production in the Soviet Union; reducing permissible culture to a straightforward, scientific chart, where a given symbol corresponded to a simple moral value; Zhdanov and his associates further sought to eliminate foreign influence from Soviet art, proclaiming that "incorrect art" was an ideological diversion^[3]
December 13 — Michael Roberts, 46, British poet, writer, critic and broadcaster, and teacher
date not known:
- Gordon Bottomley, English poet, known for his verse dramas