1866 in poetry

Events

Charles Baudelaire's collection Les Épaves is published in Belgium containing poems suppressed from Les Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1857) for outraging public morality.

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli's sonnets in the Romanesco dialect of Rome (sonetti Romaneschii, mostly written in the 1830s) 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 ("Tears of the Gymnasium Students") in which a poem entitled "La mormântul lui Aron Pumnul" ("At the Grave of Aron Pumnul") appears, signed "M. Eminovici"; on February 25 his poem "De-aș avea" ("If I were to have") 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 (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)", 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

In this year a masterpiece of cheese-making, a 7,000-pound Canadian behemoth produced in Perth, Ontario, and sent to exhibitions in Toronto, New York and Britain, was given its appropriate due in poetry by one James McIntyre (1828–1906), a Canadian known as "The Cheese Poet", whose work has outlasted his subject and might even make its fame immortal. Herewith, an excerpt of his "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds":

We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese,Lying quietly at your ease,Gently fanned by evening breeze;Thy fair form no flies dare seize.All gaily dressed, soon you'll goTo the provincial show,To be admired by many a beauIn the city of Toronto.

McIntyre's poetry has been the subject of books in the twentieth century, however, the greatest boost to his fame probably came from a number of his poems being anthologized in the collection Very Bad Poetry, edited by Ross and Kathryn Petras (Vintage, 1997).

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" (second series, 1878; third series, 1889)

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

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 (text), about an incident involving Abraham Davenport

France

Théodore de Banville, Les Exilés

François Coppée, Le Reliquaire

Paul Verlaine, Poèmes saturniens, including "Chanson d'automne" ("Autumn Song")

Le Parnasse contemporain ("The Contemporary Parnassus"), first of three volumes (Volume II 1871, Volume III 1876), 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

Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

January 20 – Richard Le Gallienne (died 1947), English poet

January 30 – Gelett Burgess (died 1951), American humorist and poet

March 2 – John Gray (died 1934), English aesthetic poet

April 11 – Bernard O'Dowd (died 1953), Australian poet and co-founder of paper Tocsin

June 5 – Edmund Vance Cooke (died 1932), Canadian-born American poet

August 16 – Dora Sigerson (died 1918), Irish poet

November 12 – Angiolo Silvio Novaro (died 1938), Italian poet and children's writer

December 3 – Ethna Carbery, born Anna Johnston (died 1902), Irish poet

December 12 – Edwin Greenslade Murphy (died 1939), Australian poet

Barcroft Blake (died 1892), Australian poet

Deaths

Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

January 23 – Thomas Love Peacock (born 1785), English satirical novelist and poet

January 31 – Friedrich Rückert (born 1788), German poet, translator and professor of Oriental languages

March 29 – John Keble (born 1792), English poet and cleric

May 18 – Francis Sylvester Mahony ("Father Prout"; born 1804), Irish humorist and poet

August 12 – Philip Stanhope Worsley (born 1835), English poet and translator