1866 in poetry

Events

• Charles Baudelaire's collection Les Épaves is published in Belgium containing poems suppressed from Les Fleurs du mal for outraging public morality. His poems also appear in the first anthology by the "Parnassians", Le Parnasse contemporain, published this year.
• Giuseppe Gioachino Belli's sonnets in the Romanesco dialect of Rome are first published, posthumously in an expurgated selection by his son Ciro.
• First publications by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu, aged 16: In January Romanian teacher Aron Pumnul dies and his students in Cernăuţi publish a pamphlet, Lăcrămioarele învățăceilor gimnaziaști in which a poem entitled "La mormântul lui Aron Pumnul" appears, signed "M. Eminovici"; on 25 February his poem "De-aș avea" is published in Iosif Vulcan's literary magazine Familia in Pest.
• Algernon Charles Swinburne's first collection Poems and Ballads causes a sensation on publication in London, especially the poems written in homage to Sappho and the sadomasochistic "Dolores ", and, under threat of prosecution, his original publisher, Moxon and Co., transfer publication rights to the more liberal John Camden Hotten.

  Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

Works published in English

United Kingdom">English poetry">United Kingdom

• Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael, Poems
• Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, The Return of the Guards, and Other Poems
• John Henry Newman, The Dream of Gerontius
• Christina Rossetti, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems
• Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, first series, including "Dolores"
• Benjamin Thorpe, assisted by Elise Otté, translation of the Poetic Edda as Edda Sæmundar Hinns Frôða: the Edda of Sæmund the Learned, from the old Norse or Icelandic
• George Yeld, Virgil reading his Æneid to Augustus and Octavia

  United States">American poetry">United States

• Elizabeth Akers, Poems
• George Arnold, Drift: A Sea-Shore Idyl
• Fitz-Greene Halleck, Lines to the Recorder
• Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
• George Henry Miles, Christine
• John Greenleaf Whittier:
• * Snow-Bound, United States
• * "Abraham Davenport", poem published in The Atlantic Monthly in May, about an incident involving Abraham Davenport

  Works published in other languages

French

France

• Théodore de Banville, Les Exilés
• François Coppée, Le Reliquaire
• Paul Verlaine, Poèmes saturniens, including "Chanson d'automne"
• Le Parnasse contemporain, first of three volumes, including poems by Théophile Gautier, Théodore de Banville, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, José-Maria de Heredia, François Coppée, Catulle Mendès, Sully Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine and Mallarmé

  Belgium

• Baudelaire, Les Épaves, French poet published in Belgium

  Other languages

• Girolamo de Rada, Rapsodi të një poeme arbëreshe, Arbëresh
• Estanislao del Campo, Fausto, satirical poem describing the impressions of a gaucho who attends Charles Gounod's opera Faust, and believes the events on stage to be happening in reality; Spanish-language, Argentina; an example of Gaucho literature

  Births

• 20 January - Richard Le Gallienne, English poet
• 30 January - Gelett Burgess, American humorist and poet
• 2 March - John Gray, English aesthetic poet
• 11 April - Bernard O'Dowd, Australian poet and co-founder of paper Tocsin
• 5 June - Edmund Vance Cooke, Canadian-born American poet
• 16 August - Dora Sigerson, Irish poet
• 12 November - :it:Angiolo Silvio Novaro|Angiolo Silvio Novaro, Italian poet and children's writer
• 3 December - Ethna Carbery, born Anna Johnston, Irish poet
• 12 December - Edwin Greenslade Murphy, Australian poet
• Barcroft Blake, Australian poet

  Deaths

• 23 January - Thomas Love Peacock, English satirical novelist and poet
• 31 January - Friedrich Rückert, German poet, translator and professor of Oriental languages
• 29 March - John Keble, English poet and cleric
• 18 May - Francis Sylvester Mahony, Irish humorist and poet
• 12 August - Philip Stanhope Worsley, English poet and translator