1756 in poetry

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

Events

 * Starting this year, English poet Christopher Smart is confined in St. Luke's Hospital, an asylum, after developing a religious mania. Among other things, he had been stopping strangers in Hyde Park and asking them to kneel down and pray for him. Samuel Johnson visited him and thought that he ought to have been at large. He once said, "I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else." During Smart's confinement he conceived the idea of the poem, A Song to David. (see also "Works published", below)

Colonial America

 * Jacob Duche, "Pennsylvania: A Poem", English, Colonial America
 * Samuel Tilden, Tilden's Miscellaneous Poems, on Divers Occasions, Chiefly to Animate and Rouse the Soldiers, English, Colonial America, posthumously published

Great Britain

 * Isaac Bickerstaffe, Leucothoe, published anonymously
 * Francies Brooke, Virginia: A tragedy, a drama that contains poems
 * Richard Owen Cambridge, An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room, a parody of Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard
 * Thomas Cole, The Arbour; or, The Rural Philosopher, published anonymously
 * William Kenrick, Epistles to Lorenzo, published anonymously
 * William Mason, Odes
 * Edward Moore, Poems, Fables and Plays
 * Christopher Pitt, Poems [...] Together with The Jordan, "By the celebrated translator of Virgil's Aeneid", according to the book
 * Christopher Smart (see also "Events" section, above):
 * Hymn to the Supreme Being
 * Translator, The Works of Horace (see also Works of Horace, Translated into Verse 1767)
 * Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, Volume 1 (Volume 2 published in 1782), criticism

Other languages

 * Solomon Gessner, Switzerland, German-language:
 * Idyllen, versions of the work eventually appeared in English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Czech (see also a second volume of Idyllen 1772)
 * Inkel und Yanko, a reworked story borrowed from The Spectator (No. 11, March 13, 1711)
 * Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon Disaster"), on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; 180 lines, composed in December, 1755; France

Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * Edward Rushton
 * Jane Cave (by this year)

Deaths
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * Stephen Duck (born 1705), English poet, by suicide