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Like the major U.S. novelists, the better-known U.S. poets stayed in hiding through 1946. The exceptions were Lyricist E. E. Cummings, who wrote a fresh, crystal-simple Christmas playlet, Santa Claus: A Morality, and William Carlos Williams, whose Paterson (Book 1) showed continued growth in the New Jersey poet-physician who rhymes for a hobby. Among the younger poets, only two appeared as serious claimants of attention: 29-year-old Robert Lowell (great-great-grandnephew of James Russell Lowell), whose 42 poems in Lord Weary's Castle revealed a devout, talented craftsman, and thirtyish Elizabeth Bishop, whose North and South, her first book, placed her immediately in the ranks of the better poets.
For many—especially some younger writers—Robert Graves's mature Poems, 1938-1945 was 1946's finest importation. Runners-up: Irishman Denis Devlin's, Lough Derg, the vigorous, pungent Selected Verse of Australian Poet John Manifold, the Welsh mysteries of Dylan Thomas.
The hoped-for postwar burst of fresh literary talent had not appeared. It was the fashion in the book trade to say it was "too soon after the war" to expect a renaissance. But people who tried to fob that off as an alibi apparently had forgotten the golden returns of 1919. In the output of that confused postwar year: Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism; James Branch Cabell's Jurgen; Joseph Conrad's The Arrow of Gold; Joseph Hergesheimer's Java Head; John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace; John Masefield's Reynard the Fox; Eugene O'Neill's The Moon of the Caribbees; and Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence.