1932 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

Events

 * April 23 – Opening of Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
 * April 26 – 32-year-old American poet Hart Crane throws himself overboard from the steamship Orizaba in the Gulf of Mexico en route from Mexico to New York in a state of alcoholic depression; his body is never recovered.
 * July – W. B. Yeats leases Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham.
 * In Vietnam, the New Poetry (Thơ mới) period begins, marked by an article and a poem of Phan Khôi, inaugurating modern literature in that country
 * T. S. Eliot begins his 1932–33 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (published in 1933 as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism).

Canada

 * Dorothy Livesay, Signpost. Toronto: Macmillan.
 * E. J. Pratt, Many Moods, Toronto: Macmillan.
 * W. W. E. Ross, Sonnets.

India, in English

 * Govind Krishna Chettur:
 * Gumataraya and other Sonnets for all Moods, Mangalore: Basel Mission Bookshop
 * The Temple tank and Other Poems, Mangalore: Basel Mission Bookshop
 * The Triumph of Love: A Sonnet Sequence, Mangalore: Basel Mission Bookshop
 * Baldoon Dhingra, Beauty's Sanctuary, Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press
 * Theodore W. La Touche, The Lion Kings of Lanka, Secunderabad: self-published
 * Manjeri Sundaraman Manjeri, Saffron and Gold and Other Poems, Madras: Shakti Karyalayam
 * Nanikram Vasanmal Thadani, The Garden of the East, Karachi: Bharat Publishing House

United Kingdom

 * Æ, pen name of George William Russell, Song and its Fountains
 * Edmund Blunden, Halfway House
 * W. H. Auden, The Orators: An English study
 * Roy Campbell, Pomegranates
 * W. H. Davies, Poems, 1930–31
 * Lord Alfred Douglas and others, ed. by John Gawsworth, Known Signatures: new poems
 * Lawrence Durrell, Ten Poems
 * T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917–1932, criticism
 * Thomas Hardy, Collected Poems
 * Julian Huxley, The Captive Shrew and other Poems of a Biologist
 * F. R. Leavis,  New Bearings in English Poetry attacks late Victorian and Georgian poetry and praises Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and other modernists
 * Hugh MacDiarmid, pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, Second Hymn to Lenin, and Other Poems
 * William Plomer, The Fivefold Screen
 * Aeneas Francon Williams, Dream Drift, by a Young Lover
 * S. Fowler Wright, The Life Of Sir Walter Scott, biography
 * W. B. Yeats, Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems, Irish poet published in the United Kingdom

United States

 * W. H. Auden, The Orators
 * Sterling Brown, Southern Road
 * Mary Elizabeth Frye, "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep"
 * Langston Hughes, Scotsboro Limited, verse drama
 * Robinson Jeffers, Thurso's Landing and Other Poems
 * Archibald MacLeish, Conquistador
 * Edward Arlington Robinson, Nicodemus
 * Allen Tate, Poems: 1928–1931
 * Sara Teasdale, A Country House
 * William Carlos Williams, The Cod Head

Other in English

 * Kenneth Slessor, Cuckooz Contrey, Sydney: Frank Johnson, Australia
 * W. B. Yeats, Words for Music Perhaps, Irish poet published in the United Kingdom

France

 * André Breton, Le Revolver a chevaux blancs
 * Paul Éluard, La Vie immédiate
 * Tristan Tzara, pen name of Sami Rosenstock, Où hoivent les loups

Indian subcontinent
Including all of the British colonies that later became India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Listed alphabetically by first name, regardless of surname:

Hindi

 * Sumitranandan Pant, Gunjana, including many popular Hindi poems such as "Nauka Vihar", "Ek Tara", "Candni", "Madhuvan"
 * Rama Nath Jyotisi, Mahabharat Mahakavya, epic Hindi poem based on the Mahabharata, with new interpretations of the episodes
 * Mahadevi Varma, Rasmi, 35 Hindi poems of the Chayavadi romantic poetry movement in Indian literature

Other Indian languages

 * Adibhatta Narayandas, translator, Rubaiyat, from Edward Fitzgerald's English translation into Sanskrit and Telugu, with the text in Persian and Roman lettering
 * Anil, also known as "Atmaram Raoji Deshpande", Phulavat, the author's first book of poetry; mostly love poems; Marathi
 * D. R. Bendre, also known as "Ambikatanayadatta", Gari, 55 poems, marked by an unusual level of abstraction, metrical experiments and metaphorical language; Kannada
 * Mahjoor, Bagh e Nisata Kae Gulo, poem on the charms of the Dal Lake; Kashmiri
 * Mathura Prasad Dikshit, editor, Govinda Gitavali, collection of Govindadasa's 17th-century devotional songs and others in the Maithili-language oral tradition
 * Maulvi Abdul Haq, editor, Jangnamah-yi Alam Ali Khan, an 18th-century Urdu narrative poem (masnavi) published for the first time; includes introductory material
 * Premendra Mitra, Prathama, the author's first book of poetry; Bengali
 * Rabindranath Thakur, Punasca, in this and in some of the author's other books in the mid-1930s, he introduced a new rhythm in poetry that "had a tremendous impact on the modern poets", according to Indian anthologist and academic Sisir Kumar Das; Bengali
 * Rallapalli Anantha Krishna Sharma, translator, Salivahana gatha saptasati saramu, translated from the Prakrit of Hāla's Gaha Sattasai into Telugu, in "ataveladi" meter; according to academic and anthologist Sisir Kumar Das, writing in 1995, the work "is still considered a model for poetical translation"
 * K. Shankara Bhat, Nalme, three long narrative poems in Kannada on tragic subjects: Honniya maduve ("Marriage of Honni"), depicting village life in coastal Karnataka; Madriya Cite ("Pyre of Madri"), on the tragic end of Madri, wife of Pandu
 * Shyamananda Jha, editor, Maithili Sandes, anthology of patriotic Maithili poetry
 * T. N. Shreekantayya, Olume, Kannada work including translations from Greek and Pakrit

Spain

 * Vicente Aleixandre, Espadas como Labios ("Swords or/as Lips")
 * Miguel Hernández, Perito en lunas ("Expert in Moon Matters")
 * María Pemán, Elegía de la tradición de Españia ("Elegy of Spain's Tradition")

Latin America

 * Luis Fabio Xammar, Las voces armoniosas, Peru

Other languages

 * Boris Pasternak, The Second Birth, Russia
 * Sir Muhammad Iqbal, The Javed Nama (Book of Eternity) in Persian, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy
 * Eugenio Montale, La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie, a chapbook of five poems published in association with the award of the Premio del Antico Fattore to Montale; Florence: Vallecchi; Italy
 * Giorgos Seferis, Στέρνα (The Cistern), Greece

Awards and honors

 * Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: George Dillon: The Flowering Stone

Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * January 2 – Peter Redgrove (died 2003), English poet
 * January 5 – Douglas Livingstone (died 1996), Malaysian-born South African poet
 * January 19 – George MacBeth (died 1992) Scottish-born poet and novelist
 * February 6 – Shankha Ghosh (died 2021), Bengali poet and critic
 * February 12 – Hugh Fox, (died 2011), American novelist and poet, a founder of the Pushcart Prize
 * March 18 – John Updike (died 2009), American novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet and writer
 * April 10 – Adrian Henri (died 2000), English member of the Liverpool poets
 * April 11 – Bienvenido Lumbera (died 2021), Filipino poet, critic and dramatist
 * May 6 – Alauddin Al-Azad (died 2009), Bengali novelist, writer, poet, literary critic and academic
 * May 7
 * Jenny Joseph (died 2018), English poet
 * Yadollah Royaee (died 2022), Iranian poet
 * May 25 – Patrick Cullinan (died 2011), South African poet
 * May 27 – Linda Pastan, American poet
 * June 18 – Geoffrey Hill (died 2016), English poet and academic at Boston University
 * June 29
 * Philip Hobsbaum (died 2005), English teacher, poet and critic
 * Ror Wolf (died 2020), German poet and writer
 * July 10 – Martin Green (died 2015), English author, poet and publisher
 * July 18 – Yevgeny Yevtushenko (died 2017), Soviet Russian poet and writer
 * July 21 – Marie-Claire Bancquart (died 2019), French poet and critic
 * August 16 – Christopher Okigbo (died in Biafran War 1967), Nigerian poet
 * September 18 – Henri Meschonnic (died 2009), French poet, linguist, translator and theoretician
 * September 13 – Eugene Perkins, African-American poet
 * October 9 – Seda Vermisheva (died 2020), Soviet Armenian-Russian poet, economist and activist
 * October 17 – Rosemary Tonks (died 2014), English poet
 * October 20 – Michael McClure (died 2020), American poet and playwright
 * October 24 – Adrian Mitchell (died 2008), English poet and playwright
 * October 27 – Sylvia Plath (suicide 1963), American-born poet and novelist (The Bell Jar)
 * December 11 – Keith Waldrop, American poet, prose stylist, visual artist; with wife Rosmarie Waldrop, founding editor of the influential and innovative Burning Deck Press
 * Also:
 * Jergen Becker, German
 * Linda M. Stitt, Canadian poet

Deaths
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * March 16 – Harold Monro, 53 (born 1879), English poet and proprietor of the Poetry Bookshop in London which helped many famous poets bring their work before the public
 * April 8 – Hubert Church, 74 (born 1857), Australian poet
 * April 27 – Hart Crane, 32 (born 1899), American poet, by suicide
 * June 21 – حافظ إبراهيم Hafez Ibrahim, 60 (born 1871), Egyptian "poet of the Nile"
 * August 29 – Raymond Knister, 33 (born 1899), Canadian novelist, short story writer and poet, drowned in a swimming accident
 * October 5 – Christopher Brennan, 61 (born 1870), Australian poet
 * October 14 – أحمد شوقي Ahmed Shawqi, 64 (born 1868), Egyptian poet
 * November 19 – Clinton Scollard, 72 (born 1860), American poet
 * December 18 – Edmund Vance Cooke, 66 (born 1866), Canadian American poet