Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

• January - Lord Byron writes his semi-autobiographical tale in verse The Corsair while snowed up at Newstead Abbey in England with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. It is published on February 1 by John Murray
• April 15 - Augusta Leigh bears a daughter, Elizabeth Medora Leigh, perhaps by Byron.
• July 28–September 13 - English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley abandons his pregnant wife and runs away with the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, accompanied by her stepsister Jane Clairmont (also 16), to war-ravaged France, quickly moving on to Switzerland.^[1]
• September 12–15 - Battle of Baltimore (War of 1812): American lawyer Francis Scott Key, witnessing the bombardment of Baltimore, Maryland, from a British ship, writes "Defence of Fort McHenry". His brother-in-law arranges to have the poem published in a broadside with a recommended tune on September 17 and on September 20, both the Baltimore Patriot and The American print it; the song quickly becomes popular, with seventeen newspapers from Georgia to New Hampshire reproducing it. In 1931 as "The Star-Spangled Banner" it is officially adopted at the national anthem of the United States:

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand,

Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation,

Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n rescued land,

Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto — "In God is our Trust;"

And the star-spangled Banner in triumph shall wave,

O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

—last stanza of Francis Scott Key's "The Battle of Fort McHenry"^[2]

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

• January 7 – Robert Nicoll, Scottish (died 1837)
• January 10 – Aubrey Thomas de Vere, Irish (died 1902)
• March 9 (February 25 O.S.) – Taras Shevchenko, Ukrainian poet and artist (died 1861)
• May 21 – Louis Janmot, French painter and poet (died 1892)
• June 28 – Frederick William Faber, English poet, hymnodist, theologian and Catholic convert (died 1863)
• August 26 – Johann Pucher (Janez Puhar), Slovene Catholic priest, inventor, scientist, photographer, artist and poet in Slovene and German (died 1864)
• September 3 – James Joseph Sylvester, English mathematician and translator (died 1897)
• December 18 – Sarah T. Bolton, née Sarah Tittle Barrett, American (died 1893)

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

• January 4 – Johann Georg Jacobi (born 1740), German
• October 4 – Samuel Jackson Pratt (born 1749), English poet and writer
• October 14 – Mercy Otis Warren (born 1727), American playwright, poet and historian^[5]
• November 22 – Edward Rushton (born 1756), English poet, bookseller and abolitionist

• Poetry
• List of years in poetry
• List of years in literature
• 19th century in literature
• 19th century in poetry
• Romantic poetry
• Golden Age of Russian Poetry (1800–1850)
• Weimar Classicism period in Germany, commonly considered to have begun in 1788 and to have ended either in 1805, with the death of Friedrich Schiller, or 1832, with the death of Goethe
• List of poets