1819 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France). The period from September 1818 to September of this year is often referred to among scholars of John Keats as "the Great Year", or "the Living Year", because during this period he is most productive, writing his most critically acclaimed works. Several major events have been noted as factors in this increased productivity: namely, the death of his brother Tom (December 1818), the critical reviews of Endymion (1818), and his meeting Fanny Brawne (November 1818), to whom he proposes marriage on October 19. He has been inspired by a series of recent lectures by Hazlitt on English poets and poetic identity and has also met Wordsworth. Having given up work at Guy's Hospital and taken up residence at a new house, Wentworth Place, on Hampstead Heath on the edge of London, between April 21 and the end of May he writes the ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci and most of his major odes: Ode to Psyche, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Indolence and Ode on Melancholy. In the summer he writes Lamia and on September 19 he writes his ode To Autumn at Winchester. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Italy, also has one of his most productive years. He writes The Masque of Anarchy in reaction to the Peterloo Massacre of August 16 (news of which reaches him on September 5) and sends it to a newspaper (although it is not published until 1832, after his death, with a preface by Leigh Hunt), also writing the political sonnet England in 1819 (published 1839), Ode to the West Wind (published 1820), The Cenci: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (a verse drama, printed in Italy) and Julian and Maddalo (published in his Posthumous Poems of 1824). Konstantin Batyushkov ends his time as a secretary to the Russian diplomatic mission at Naples and writes some of his last poems before his mental breakdown, notably "You awake, oh Bayya, from the tomb..." («Ты пробуждаешься, о Байя, из гробницы...»). William Wordsworth begins another major revision of The Prelude.