1862 in poetry

Events

• February 11 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on returning home with Algernon Charles Swinburne after a night on the town, finds his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, dead on the floor from an overdose of laudanum. At her funeral, he places a sheaf of poems in the coffin.
• December 28 - Walt Whitman moves to Washington, D.C., where he will volunteer in army hospitals.
• Emily Dickinson's year of greatest poetic productivity.

Works published in English

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Last Words, a reply to F. W. Newman's Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice 1861, itself a reply to Arnold's On Translating Homer, published that year
• William Barnes, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect: Third Collection
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Last Poems, edition prepared by her husband, Robert Browning; posthumously published
• Charles Stuart Calverley, published anonymously, Verses and Translations
• A. H. Clough, Last Poems, published posthumously with a memoir by F. T. Palgrave
• Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, first publication of the author's series of biographical essays on the Lake Poets, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey
• Charles Hindley, writing as Mother Shipton, Mother Shipton's Prophecy, dated 1448
• George Meredith, Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside
• Coventry Patmore, Victories of Love
• Adelaide A. Procter, A Chaplet of Verses, illustrated by Richard Doyle
• Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems
• Joseph Skipsey, ''Poems, Songs and Ballads''

United States">American poetry">United States

• Oliver Wendell Holmes:
• * Songs in Many Keys
• * The Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Julia Ward Howe, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", published in The Atlantic Monthly, February
• William Ross Wallace, The Liberty Bell
• John Greenleaf Whittier, ''The Furnace Blast''

Other in English

• Charles Harpur, A Poet's Home, verse pamphlet, Australia
• Henry Kendall, Poems and Songs, Australia

Works published in other languages

• Aleardo Aleardi, Canto politico, Italy
• Charles Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose, France
• Dalpatram, editor, Kavhadohan, an anthology of Gujarati-language poetry
• Leconte de Lisle, Poèmes barbares, France
• Henrik Ibsen, Terje Vigen, Norway

Births

• January 10 - Hoshino Tenchi 星野天知, Japanese Meiji period poet and martial arts master; a co-founder of Bungakukai literary magazine; 8th Grand Master and a teacher of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu martial-arts school
• January 12 - Edith Emma Cooper, half of "Michael Field", English
• January 24 - Edith Wharton, American fiction writer
• c. January 28 - Ella Rhoads Higginson, American
• February 17 - Mori Ōgai 森 鷗外 / 森 鴎外 Japanese physician, translator, novelist and poet
• March 2 - John Jay Chapman, American writer
• April 24 - A. C. Benson, English
• May 22 - John Kendrick Bangs, American
• June 6 - Sir Henry Newbolt, English
• June 18 - Carolyn Wells, American novelist and poet
• August 2 - Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian
• September 28 - W. T. Goodge, Australian
• October 29 - John Bernard O'Hara, Australian
• November 4 - Jean Blewett, Canadian
• November 5 - Thomas William Heney, Australian

Deaths

• February 11 - Elizabeth Siddal, English artist, artist's model and poet, wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; from an opium overdose
• February 14 - Emily Rebecca Page, American poet and editor
• February 21 - Justinus Kerner, German poet of the Swabian school and physician
• February 24 - Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Danish poet, playwright and historical novelist
• March 13 - Roderick Flanagan, Australian
• May 6 - Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist; from tuberculosis
• August 23 - Friedrich Julius Hammer, German poet
• date not known - Gopala Krishna Pattanayak, Indian, Oriya-language poet