- W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio
- Paul Blackburn, Brooklyn Manhattan Transit: A Bouquet for Flatbush
- Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters
- E. E. Cummings, Collected Poems
- Ted Hughes, Lupercal
- Weldon Kees, The Collected Poems (posthumous; ed. Donald Justice)
- Sylvia Plath, The Colossus
And some prizes:
- National Book Award for Poetry: Robert Lowell, Life Studies
- Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: W. D. Snodgrass, Heart's Needle
- Bollingen Prize: Delmore Schwartz
- Academy of American Poets Fellowship: Jesse Stuart
From Kees, "Robinson at Home":
This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire
To die like this has known a lessening.
Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear.
But not in sleep.--Observant scholar, traveller,
Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave
A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades
A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué,
A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes—
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
