— From Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", published as part of Through the Looking Glass
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
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" (No reprisals) and on June 11 writing the poem "Sur une barricade" (On the barricade).
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
Robert Browning:
Blaustion's Adventure
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society
Lewis Carroll (pen name of C. L. Dodgson), Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, including "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (published this year, although the book states "1872")
"Thomas Maitland" (i.e., Robert Williams Buchanan) attacks Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other members of what Buchanan calls the "Fleshly School" of English poetry in The Contemporary Review (October); and Rossetti replies in "The Stealthy School of Criticism" in the Athenaeum (December 16)
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 (one of Tennyson's "Arthurian Idylls", later published in Gareth and Lynette 1872)
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 (or Hiner) Miller:
Songs of the Sierras
Pacific Poems
Walt Whitman:
Leaves of Grass, fifth edition
Passage to India
John Greenleaf Whittier, Miriam and Other Poems
François Coppée, Fais ce que dois , short verse drama inspired by the Franco-Prussian War; France
Arthur Rimbaud, Le bateau ivre ("The Drunken Boat"), France
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
February 3 – Francis Joseph Sherman (died 1926), Canadian
February 25 (February 13 Old Style) – Lesya Ukrainka, born Larysa Kosach (died 1913), Ukrainian
April 16 – John Millington Synge (died 1909), 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 (died 1938), African-American author, poet, early civil rights activist and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance
July 3 – W.