23 World War II poets

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.

Charles Stanley Causley, CBE, FRSL was a Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer. His work is often noted for its simplicity and directness as well as its associations with folklore, legends and magic—especially when linked to his native Cornwall.

Timothy Corsellis was an English poet of World War II.

Keith Castellain Douglas was an English poet noted for his war poetry during the Second World War and his wry memoir of the Western Desert campaign, Alamein to Zem Zem. He was killed in action during the invasion of Normandy.

Benjamin Fondane or Benjamin Fundoianu was a Romanian and French poet, critic and existentialist philosopher, also noted for his work in film and theater. Known from his Romanian youth as a Symbolist poet and columnist, he alternated Neoromantic and Expressionist themes with echoes from Tudor Arghezi, and dedicated several poetic cycles to the rural life of his native Moldavia. Fondane, who was of Jewish Romanian extraction and a nephew of Jewish intellectuals Elias and Moses Schwartzfeld, participated in both minority secular Jewish culture and mainstream Romanian culture. During and after World War I, he was active as a cultural critic, avant-garde promoter and, with his brother-in-law Armand Pascal, manager of the theatrical troupe Insula.

Roy Broadbent Fuller was an English writer, known mostly as a poet.

Mirza Gelovani was a Georgian poet who died, fighting in the Soviet ranks during World War II at the age of 27.

Hirsch Glick was a Jewish poet and partisan.

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie was an American singer-songwriter, who is considered to be one of the most significant figures in American western folk music. His music, including songs such as "This Land Is Your Land", has inspired several generations both politically and musically.

Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.

Hamish Scott Henderson was a Scottish poet, songwriter, communist, intellectual and soldier.

Randall Jarrell jə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.

General Tadamichi Kuribayashi was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army, part-time writer, haiku poet, diplomat, and commanding officer of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff. He is best known for having been the overall commander of the Japanese garrison during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Alun Lewis was a Welsh poet. He is one of the best-known English-language poets of the Second World War.

Sorley MacLean was a Scottish Gaelic poet, described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics". Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderón de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.

Miklós Radnóti was a Hungarian poet and teacher.

Vernon Scannell was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.

Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, philosopher, historian, short story writer and political prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism and helped to raise global awareness of the Soviet Gulag forced-labor camp system.

Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.

Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.