1837 in poetry

Events

• July - English "peasant poet" John Clare first enters an asylum for the insane, at High Beach in Essex.
• October - The United States Magazine and Democratic Review is established by John L. O'Sullivan, a political and literary magazine that publishes Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and others.

  Works in English

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• Richard Harris Barham's Ingoldsby Legends
• Lord Byron, Dramas
• Eliza Cook's The Old Armchair
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters and Works, including introductory anecdotes by Lady Louisa Stuart
• Thomas Love Peacock's The Paper Money Lyrics
• Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, first two volumes published this year; second two volumes published in 1838
• Letitia Elizabeth Landon, writing under the pen name "L.E.L." Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1838

  United States">American poetry">United States

• Thomas Holley Chivers, Nacoochee
• George Moses Horton's Hope of Liberty — Poems by a Slave, a second edition of Hope of Liberty, originally published in 1829; the new edition was published in Philadelphia by an antislavery group; Horton received no royalties ; contains 23 poems, including three on the author's feelings about having been a slave;
• Frederick William Shelton, The Trollopiad; or, Travelling Gentlemen in America, a verse satire on British travel writer Frances Trollope, who wrote harshly about Americans in her Domestic Manners of the Americans 1832
• John Greenleaf Whittier, Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question in the United States, the author's first poetry book, published in an unauthorized edition by Boston abolitionists; the next year, Whittier expanded the collection and published it under the title Poems; includes poems attacking slavery, such as "Clerical Oppressors", which focuses on Southern church leaders who use Christianity to defend slavery, and "Stanzas", on the irony of America's commitments to both freedom and slavery

  Works published in other languages

• Victor Hugo, Les Voix intérieures, France
• José de Espronceda, El estudiante de Salamanca, first fragment, Spain
• Alphonse de Lamartine's Chute d'un ange, France
• Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Les Pensées d'août, France

  Births

• January 30 - Augusta Webster, born Julia Augusta Davies, English
• February 24 - Rosalía de Castro, Spanish Galician poet and writer
• March 1 - William Dean Howells, American writer, editor and critic
• March 18 - Eliza A. Pittsinger, American, "The California Poetess"
• April 1 - Jorge Isaacs, born Jorge Isaacs Ferrer, Colombian writer, politician and explorer
• April 5 - Algernon Charles Swinburne, English
• April 10 - Forceythe Willson, born Byron Forceythe Willson, American
• September 8 - Joaquin Miller, born Cincinnatus Heine Miller, American "Poet of the Sierras"
• Undated - Ram Sharma, Indian, English-language poet and journalist

  Deaths

• January 29 - Alexander Pushkin, Russian poet, killed in a duel
• June 14 - Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet, philosopher, essayist and philologist
• March 15 - Lukijan Mušicki, Serbian poet, prose writer and polyglot
• September 8 - Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, English
• October 17 - George Colman the Younger, English dramatist and miscellaneous writer
• October 19 - Hendrik Doeff, Dutch trader, the first westerner to write haiku in Japanese
• November 11 - Thomas Green Fessenden, American