Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Frederick James Furnivall founds the Shelley Society
September 18 – The "Symbolist Manifesto" (Le Symbolisme) is published in French newspaper Le Figaro by Greek-born poet Jean Moréas, who announces that Symbolism is hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description," and that its goal instead is to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal"
December 10 – American poet Emily Dickinson dies aged 55 of Bright's disease at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts with fewer than a dozen of her poems published and is buried under the self-penned epitaph "Called Back". Following first publication of a collection of her poems in 1890, she will become regarded (with Walt Whitman) as one of the two quintessential nineteenth-century American poets
Charles Mair, Tecumseh: A Drama, a closet drama in blank verse; published in Toronto.
Charles G. D. Roberts, In Divers Tones. (Boston: Lothrop).
William Alexander, St. Augustine's Holiday, and Other Poems
Rudyard Kipling, Departmental Ditties, and Other Verse
Edith Nesbit, Lays and Legends, first series (see also second series 1892)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Collected Works, posthumously published
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After
William Butler Yeats, Mosada: A Dramatic Poem a short verse play in three scenes, published as a pamphlet of 100 copies paid for by his father (Yeats' first published work outside a journal), Irish poet published in the United Kingdom
Charles Follen Adams, Cut, Cut Behind!
William Ellery Channing, John Brown and the Heroes of Harpers Ferry
Celia Thaxter, Idyls and Pastorals
Jones Very, Poems and Essays
John Greenleaf Whittier, St.