1871 in poetry

Events

• April – French author Victor Hugo moves to Brussels to take care of the family of his son, who has just died, but closely follows events in the Paris Commune, on April 21 publishing the poem "Pas de représailles" and on June 11 writing the poem "Sur une barricade".

Works published in English

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• Robert Browning:
• * Blaustion's Adventure
• * Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society
• Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, including "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter"
• "Thomas Maitland" attacks Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of what Buchanan calls the "Fleshly School" of English poetry in The Contemporary Review ; and Rossetti replies in "The Stealthy School of Criticism" in the Athenaeum
• Monckton Milnes, falsely attributed to George Colman the Younger, The Rodiad, flagellatory poem, falsely dated 1810
• James Brunton Stephens, Convict Once, Scottish-born Australian poet published in London
• Algernon Charles Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise
• Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament" published in The Contemporary Review, December edition

United States">American poetry">United States

• William Cullen Bryant, Poems
• William Ellery Channing, The Wanderer
• Bret Harte, East and West Poems
• John Hay, Pike County Ballads
• Emma Lazarus, Admetus and Other Poems
• Joaquin Miller, pen name of Cincinnatus Heine Miller:
• * Songs of the Sierras
• * Pacific Poems
• Walt Whitman:
• * Leaves of Grass, fifth edition
• * Passage to India
• John Greenleaf Whittier, ''Miriam and Other Poems''

Works published in other languages

• François Coppée, Fais ce que dois , short verse drama inspired by the Franco-Prussian War; France
• Arthur Rimbaud, Le bateau ivre, France

Births

• February 3 – Francis Joseph Sherman, Canadian
• February 25 – Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Kosach, Ukrainian
• April 16 – John Millington Synge, Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, collector of folklore, a prominent figure in the Irish Literary Revival and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre
• June 17 – James Weldon Johnson, African-American author, poet, early civil rights activist and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance
• July 3 – W. H. Davies, Welsh-born poet and writer who spends most of his life as a tramp in the United States and United Kingdom, but becomes known as one of the most popular poets of his time
• July 15 – Kunikida Doppo 國木田 獨歩, Japanese, Meiji period romantic poet and one of the novelists who pioneers naturalism in Japan
• September 2 – John Le Gay Brereton, Australian poet, critic and academic
• September 9 – Ralph Hodgson, British
• October 30 – Paul Valéry, French philosopher, author and Symbolist poet who also writes essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music and current events
• November 1 – Stephen Crane, American novelist, poet and journalist
• Date not known
• * Hafez Ibrahim, Egyptian, Arabic-language "poet of the Nile"
• * Madhavanuj, pen name of Kashinath Hari Modak, Indian, Marathi-language poet and translator; a physician

Deaths

• February 12 – Alice Cary, American poet
• April 23 – James Monroe Whitfield, African-American barber, poet and abolitionist
• May 11
• * John Herschel, English polymath
• * Thomas Buchanan Read, American poet and portrait painter
• July 31 – Phoebe Cary, sister of Alice, American poet
• September 22 – Charlotte Elliott, English religious poet