1656 in poetry

Events

• This year in England, John Phillips, a nephew of John Milton, is summoned before the privy council for his share in a book of licentious poems, Sportive Wit, suppressed by the authorities but almost immediately replaced by a similar collection, Wit and Drollery.
• Hallgrímur Pétursson begins work on his ''Passion Hymns''

Works published

• Margaret Cavendish, Lady Newcastle, Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, fiction, poetry and prose
• Abraham Cowley:
• * Miscellanies, including "On the Death of Mr. Crashaw"
• * Poems
• * Pindaric Odes
• Sir John Denham, translator, The Destruction of Troy, published anonymously, partial translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2
• William Davenant, Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems
• William Drummond, Poems
• John Evelyn, translator, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus, translation of the Latin of Lucretius' De rerum natura, with both English and Latin; including commendatory poems by Sir Richard Brown, Edmund Waller and Christopher Wase ; this work was the first attempt to translate the work into English; Evelyn translated only the first book after realizing that he didn't have the ability to write a translation, as he put it, "to equal the elegancy of the original", although some of his friends warned him of the danger of the atheistic work to his morals, spirituality and reputation
• Richard Flecknoe, The Diarium, or Journall, anonymously published
• Mary Oxlie, authored a commendatory poem of fifty-two lines, ''To William Drummond of Hawthornden''

Births

• Lady Mary Chudleigh, English poet and essayist
• Henry Hall, English poet and composer

Deaths

• Joseph Hall, English bishop, satirist, moralist, and poet
• Johan van Heemskerk, Dutch poet
• Johann Klaj, German poet