1772 in poetry

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

Events



 * Because many white people in colonial Massachusetts found it hard to believe that a black woman could have enough talent to write poetry, Phillis Wheatley had to defend her literary ability in court. She was examined by a group of Boston luminaries including John Erving, Reverend Charles Chauncey, John Hancock, Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, and his lieutenant governor, Andrew Oliver. They concluded she had in fact written the poems ascribed to her and signed an attestation which was added to the preface to her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published in Aldgate, London in 1773 after printers in Boston refused to publish the text.

Colonial America

 * Hugh Henry Brackenridge, with Philip Freneau, "A Poem on the Rising Glory of America"
 * Nathaniel Evans, Poems on Several Occasions, with Some Other Compositions
 * Philip Freneau, The American Village. To Which Are Added Several Other Original Pieces in Verse
 * Francis Hopkinson, "Dirtilla"
 * John Trumbull, The Progress of Dulness, published in three parts from this year to 1773
 * Biography, criticism, scholarship
 * Timothy Dwight, "A Dissertation on the History, Eloquence, and Poetry of the Bible", criticism

United Kingdom

 * Mark Akenside, The Poems of Mark Akenside, posthumous
 * Thomas Chatterton, The Execution of Sir Charles Bawdin, posthumously and anonymously published; attributed in another 1772 edition to "Thomas Rowlie", a fictional author invented by Chatterton
 * Charles Jenner, Town Eclogues
 * William Kenrick, Love in the Suds: A Town Eclogue
 * William Mason, The English Garden, Volume 1 (an early draft privately printed for Mason in about 1771, all copies of which he later tried to destroy; Book the Second privately printed in 1776, trade edition 1777)
 * Musae Seatonianae: A complete collection of the Cambridge prize poems, from the first institution of that premium by the Rev. Mr. Tho. Seaton, in 1750, to the present time. To which are added two poems, likewise written for the prize, Mr. [G.] Bally and Mr [J.] Scott, anthology of poems that won the annual Seatonian Prize at Cambridge University
 * Christopher Smart, Hymns, for the Amusement of Children, published anonymously
 * George Alexander Stevens, Songs, Comic and Satyrical
 * Anthologies
 * Sir William Jones, Poems from Asiatic Languages, published anonymously

Other languages

 * Solomon Gessner, Idyllen, a second volume (first volume 1756), Switzerland, German-language
 * Martin Wieland, Golden Mirror, Germany

Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * William Cliffton, (died 1799), American
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge (died 1834), English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who was one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets
 * Friedrich von Hardenberg (died 1801), German writer, poet, mystic, philosopher and civil engineer
 * Novalis (died 1801), writer, poet, and philosopher of early German Romanticism

Deaths
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * James Graeme
 * Johann Jakob Thill (born 1747), German
 * William Wilkie (born 1721), Scottish poet