1763 in poetry

Events

• Robert Lloyd is in Fleet Prison for debt. His fellow poet and friend, Charles Churchill, pays a guinea a week for his better maintenance, and raises a subscription to set him free, although Lloyd will still be in prison when he dies next year..
• January - Christopher Smart's asylum confinement ends at Mr Potter's asylum in London ; while confined, Smart has written A Song to David, published this year, and Jubilate Agno, not published until 1939.
• Approximate date - Chinese Qing dynasty scholar Sun Zhu compiles Three Hundred Tang Poems, an anthology of poems from the Chinese Tang dynasty.

  Works published

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• Richard Bentley the younger, Patriotism, published anonymously
• Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal, published anonymously; criticism
• John Brown, A Dissertation on Poetry and Music, criticism, including "The Cure of Saul. A Sacred Ode."
• Charles Churchill, Poems
• William Jones, Caïssa a poem about the mythological origins of chess; written in Latin hexameters
• George Keate, The Alps
• Robert Lloyd, translator, The Death of Adam: A tragedy, translated from the original German of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock's Der Tod Adams
• James Macpherson, Temora: An ancient epic poem, as with Fingal 1762, the author posed as the translator of what he asserted was an ancient Gaelic epic by the supposed Ossian, son of Fingal
• William Mason, Elegies
• Christopher Smart, A Song to David

Charles Churchill's poems of controversy

• The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots Pastoral, the first of several Churchill poems that stirred controversy this year, was a violent satire on Scottish influence and fell in with the current hatred of Lord Bute. The Scottish place-hunters were as much alarmed as the actors had been in 1761, when Churchill terrorised them with his Rosciad.
• An Epistle to William Hogarth was in answer to the caricature of Wilkes made during the trial. In the poem, Churchill attacked Hogarth's vanity and envy with an invective which David Garrick quoted as shocking and barbarous. Hogarth retaliated with a caricature of Churchill as a bear in torn clerical bands hugging a pot of porter and a club made of lies and North Britons.
• The Duellist is a virulent satire on the most active opponents of Wilkes in the House of Lords, especially Bishop Warburton.
• The Ghost, was an attack on Samuel Johnson among others, calling Johnson, "Pomposo, insolent and loud, Vain idol of a scribbling crowd."
• The Conference
• The Author, highly praised by Churchill's contemporaries.

  Other languages

• Jean-François Marmontel, Poétique française, French criticism
• Giuseppe Parini, Il giorno, Italy

  Births

• April 27 - James Hurdis, rector of Bishopsgate in Sussex, professor of poetry in Oxford
• May 11 - János Batsányi, Hungarian poet
• June 15 - Kobayashi Issa 小林一茶, Japanese poet and Buddhist priest known for his haiku poems and journals; widely regarded as one of the four haiku masters in Japan, along with Bashō, Buson and Shiki
• July 30 - Samuel Rogers, English poet
• September 10 - James Thomson, Scottish weaver poet
• Also:
• * St. John Honeywood,, American
• * Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins, English novelist and occasional poet

  Deaths

• January 11 - Caspar Abel, German theologian, historian, and poet
• January 29 - Louis Racine, French poet
• February 11 - William Shenstone, English poet
• June 29 - Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht, Swedish poet, feminist and salon hostess
• September 26 - John Byrom, English poet
• date not known - James Sterling, English Colonial American