Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
June 5 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, living at Nether Stowey in the Quantock Hills, renews his friendship with William Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy, who take a house nearby.
August – The British Home Office sends an agent to Nether Stowey to investigate Coleridge and Wordsworth who are suspected of being French spies.
October – Coleridge composes Kubla Khan in an opium-induced dream and writes down only a fragment of it on waking.
November – Wordsworth suggests to Coleridge the theme of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner on a walk in the Quantocks.
William Blake illustrates Edward Young's Night-Thoughts.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems ... Second Edition
William Drennan, The Wake of William Orr
George Dyer, The Poet's Fate
Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, edited by Joseph Warton, posthumous
Charlotte Smith, Elegaic Sonnets, and Other Poems, Volume 2, sequel to Elegaic Sonnets 1784
Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins and Sir Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, Tributes of Affection by a Lady and her Brother
Mary Wollstonecraft, "On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature", Monthly Magazine (April 1797), criticism
Sarah Wentworth Morton, publishing under the name "Philenia", Beacon Hill: A Local Poem, Historic and Descriptive, on the American Revolution; conventional verse in neoclassical form
Robert Treat Paine Jr. "The Ruling Passion", the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa poem for this year
Robert Southey, Poems, actually published in 1796, although the title page states "1797"
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
January 10 – Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (died 1848), German
March 27 – Alfred de Vigny (died 1863), French poet, playwright and novelist
August 30 – Mary Shelley, née Godwin (died 1851), English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, travel writer and poet
October 13 – William Motherwell (died 1835), Scottish
December 13 – Heinrich H