1966 in poetry

Years in poetry:	1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969
Years in literature:	1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969
Decades in poetry:	1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
Centuries in poetry:	19th century 20th century 21st century
Centuries:	19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades:	1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s
Years:	1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969

[edit] Events

Philip Hobsbaum, who had founded The Belfast Group in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1963, departs for Glasgow, and the Belfast Group meetings lapsed for a while, but then was reconstituted in 1968 by Michael Allen, Arthur Terry, and Seamus Heaney. At one time or another, the grouping also includes Michael Longley, James Simmons, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, Stewart Parker, Bernard MacLaverty and the critic Edna Longley. Meetings will be held at Seamus and Marie Heaney's house on Ashley Avenue. The Belfast Group will last until 1972.

* Russian poet Joseph Brodsky returns to Leningrad from the exile near the Arctic Circle where he had been sent when a Soviet court in 1964 convicted him of "parisitism".

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda recording poems at the U.S. Library of Congress this year

A.R. Ammons, Northfield Poems
John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains
Ted Berrigan, Some Things
Paul Blackburn,
- 16 Sloppy Haiku and a Lyric for Robert Reardon
- Sing Song
- translator, Poem of the Cid
Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
Randall Jarrell (died 1965), The Lost World (published posthumously)
Josephine Jacobsen, The Animal Inside
LeRoi Jones, Black Art
James Merrill, Nights and Days
Kenneth Rexroth, Collected Shorter Poems
Giorgos Seferis, Τρία Κρυφά Ποιήματα (Three Hidden Poems)
R.S. Thomas, Pietà
Anthony Thwaite and John Hollander publish the first anthology of double dactyls, Jiggery Pokery

See 1966 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

March 5 — Anna Akhmatova, 76, Russian poet
January 23 — Berton Braley, 83
May 14 — Georgia Douglas Johnson, 86, of a stroke
June 10 — Henry Treese, 55
June 27 — Arthur David Waley, 76, noted translator of Chinese poetry and an English Orientalist and Sinologist
July 11 — Delmore Schwartz, 52, of a heart attack
July 25 — Frank O'Hara, 40, American poet and key member of the New York School of poetry.
August 14:
- Raymond Duncan, 91
- Alfred Kreymborg, 82, American poet, novelist, playwright, literary editor and anthologist
August 29 — Melvin Tolson, 68, American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician
September 25 — Mina Loy, 73, British-born American artist, poet, Futurist and actor
date not known:
- W.W.E. Ross
- John Cournos (born 1881), Russian-American Imagist poet, but better known for his novels, short stories, essays, criticism and translations of Russian literature; wrote under the pen name "John Courtney"