1684 in poetry

Events

• April 15 - Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, a French poet, critic and scholar, is admitted to the Académie française only by the king's wish
• Japanese poet Ihara Saikaku composes 23,500 verses in 24 hours at the Sumiyoshi-taisha at Osaka; the scribes cannot keep pace with his dictation and just count the verses

Works published

• Alaol, Padmavati, in Bengali
• Aphra Behn, Poems Upon Several Occasions
• Samuel Butler, Hudibras. In Three Parts, published anonymously
• Thomas Creech:
• * Translator, The Idylliums of Theocritus, with Rapin's Discourse of Pastorals Done into English, translated from Rene Rapin, Treatise de carmine pastorali
• * Translator, The Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles of Horace, the only complete translation of Horace's poems until that of Philip Francis
• Wentworth Dillon, fourth Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, criticism in verse form, a second edition was also published this year
• John Dryden and Jacob Tonson, editors, Miscellany Poems, first in a series of miscellanies published by Tonson
• Thomas D'Urfey, The Malcontent: a Satyr, published anonymously; a sequel to The Progress of Honesty 1681
• John Norris, Poems and Discourses. Occasionally written
• John Oldham, The Works of Mr John Oldham, posthumously published

Births

• December 3 - Ludvig Holberg, Danish poetry/Norwegian poet and playwright

Deaths

• Wu Jiaji, Chinese poet