1771 in poetry

Events

• April 9 - Portuguese poet Pedro Correia Garção is arrested and committed to prison by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal.
• English poet William Mason is employed to lay out a flower garden at Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire by Viscount Nuneham.

  Works published

English">English poetry">English Colonial America">American poetry">America

• Jane Dunlap, Poems upon Several Sermons Preached by the Rev'd George Whitefield, Colonial Massachusetts
• Levi Frisbie, "A Poem on the Rise and Progress of Moor's Indian Charity School", English, Colonial America
• John Trumbull, "An Elegy on the Death of Mr. Buckingham St. John", English, Colonial America

  United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• James Beattie, The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius, Book 1,
• James Cawthorn, Poems
• John Langhorne, The Fables of Flora
• Henry Mackenzie, Pursuits of Happiness, published anonymously after a stay in London; Scottish
• Thomas Percy, The Hermit of Warkworth, published anonymously
• Henry James Pye, The Triumph of Fashion
• John Wesley, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, published in 32 volumes by the Methodist divine and hymn writer
• Phillis Wheatley, an elegy to George Whitefield first published in Colonial America in 1770, where it received widespread acclaim. It was published within weeks of his death as a broadside in Boston, then in Newport, Rhode Island, then four more times in Boston and a dozen more times in New York, Philadelphia and Newport.

  Other

• Ambrosius Stub, Arier og andre poetiske Stykker, edited by T. S. Heiberg; Denmark, posthumous
• Christoph Martin Wieland, Der neue Amadis, a comic poem in 18 cantos; Germany

  Births

• March 21 - Thomas John Dibdin, English dramatist and songwriter
• June 3 - Sydney Smith, English writer, wit and Anglican clergyman
• August 15 - Walter Scott, Scottish poet and historical novelist
• November 4 - James Montgomery, Scottish editor and poet
• November 11 - Thomas Green Fessenden,, American
• December 25 - Dorothy Wordsworth, English author, poet and diarist
• Bankidas Asiya, Rajasthani poet and scholar
• Liang Desheng, Chinese poet and writer during the Qing Dynasty

  Deaths

• July 30 - Thomas Gray, English poet, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University; died in Cambridge, then buried beside his mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, the setting for his famous 1750 poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
• May 21 - Christopher Smart, English poet
• August 19 - Daniel Schiebeler, German writer and poet
• September 13 - John Gambold, Anglo-Welsh bishop of the Moravian church and poet
• September 17 - Tobias Smollett, Scottish poet and author
• October 2 - James Plumptre, English clergyman, dramatist and hymnodist
• December 23 - Johann Friedrich Löwen, German poet, intellectual, drama theorist and at one time a confidant of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
• Francis Williams, black Jamaican scholar and poet