1932 in poetry

• 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.^[1]
• July – W. B. Yeats leases Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham.
• In Vietnam, the New Poetry (ThÆ¡ 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).

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

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^[15]
• 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^[16]
• 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 (died 2023), 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 (died 2023), 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 (died 2023), American poet, prose stylist, visual artist; with wife Rosmarie Waldrop, founding editor of the influential and innovative Burning Deck Press
• Also:
  • Jergen Becker, German poet^[17]
  • Lena Pappa (died 2025), Greek poet
  • Linda M. Stitt (died 2020), Canadian poet

Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

• February 22 – Harriet Converse Moody, 74 (born 1857), American patron of the arts
• 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

• Poetry
• List of poetry awards
• List of years in poetry
• New Objectivity in German literature and art