1839 in poetry

Events

• William Wordsworth granted an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree by Oxford University.

Works published

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• Philip James Bailey, Festus, reprinted in numerous editions up to 1889, when the 50th anniversary edition was published
• Thomas De Quincey, biographical essays on the Lake Poets in the series Recollections of the Lake Poets, in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine :
• * "William Wordsworth," January, February, and April
• * "William Wordsworth and Robert Southey," July
• * "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," August
• * "Recollections of Grasmere," September
• * "The Saracen's Head," December
• William Gaskell, Temperance Rhymes
• Henry Hart Milman, Poetical Works
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, posthumous works :
• * The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in four volumes is published from January to May, edited by Mary Shelley, with her preface and notes, and dedicated to the Shelleys' son, Percy Florence Shelley; London: Edward Moxon
• * England in 1819, a political sonnet composed in 1819, first published
• The 'Pearl Poet', Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance first published complete, in Syr Gawayne: a collection of ancient romance-poems by Scottish and English authors relating to that celebrated knight of the Round Table edited by Frederic Madden for the Bannatyne Club

United States">American poetry">United States

• Ralph Waldo Emerson:
• * "Each and All", a poem calling Nature "the perfect whole"
• * "The Humble-Bee", praising the "yellow breeched philosopher"
• * "The Rhodora"
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night, the author's first volume of original poetry; includes "A Psalm of Life" and "Light of the Stars"
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Haunted Palace, an allegory of mental states; considered one of the author's best poems, written at a time when his finances forced him to concentrate on stories rather than poetry; originally published in the Baltimore Museum and later included in "The Fall of the House of Usher"
• William Gilmore Simms, Southern Passages and Pictures, lyrical, sentimental and descriptive poems; New York
• Jones Very, Essays and Poems, prose and poetry

Other

• Bjarni Thorarensen, Íslands minni, Iceland
• Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Vila Rica, posthumous, Brazil
• Girolamo de Rada, Serafina Topia, Arbëresh
• Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Pauvres Fleurs, France
• Gooru Churun Dutt, School Hours or Poems Composed at School, Calcutta: T. B. Scott and Co.; India, Indian poetry in English

Births

• January 1 - James Ryder Randall, American
• February 2 - Helen Marr Hurd, American
• February 7 - William Little, English-born Australian
• February 9 - Laura Redden Searing, deaf American poet and journalist
• March 16 - John Butler Yeats, Irish artist and poet, father of W. B. Yeats
• April 18 - Henry Kendall, Australian
• June 21 - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Brazilian
• August 3 - Helen Adelia Manville, American poet and litterateur
• August 4 - Walter Pater, English writer on aesthetics
• August 25 - Bret Harte, American writer of fiction and poetry
• December 30 - John Todhunter, Irish poet and playwright
• Date not known - Velutheri Kesavan Vaidyar, Indian, Malayalam-language poet

Deaths

• April 13 - Robert Millhouse, English weaver poet
• April 22 - Thomas Haynes Bayly, English
• May 4 - Denis Davydov, Russian soldier-poet of the Napoleonic Wars, inventor of a specific genre, hussar poetry, noted for its hedonism and bravado
• May 21 - José María Heredia y Heredia, Cuban poet in Mexico
• July 15 - Winthrop Mackworth Praed, English poet
• October 11 - Leonor de Almeida Portugal, Portuguese poet