1871 in poetry

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" — From Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", published as part of Through the Looking Glass

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

United Kingdom
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * Robert Browning:
 * Blaustion's Adventure
 * Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society
 * Lewis Carroll (pen name of C.L. Dodgson), Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, including "Jabberwocky" (published this year, although the book states "1872")
 * Edward Lear, More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc.
 * "Thomas Maitland" (i.e., Robert Williams Buchanan) attacks Dante Gabriel Rossetti in "The Fleshly School of Poetry" in Contemporary Review (October); and Rossetti replies in "The Stealthy School of Criticism" in Athenaeum (December)
 * Algernon Charles Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise
 * Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament" published in the Contemporary Review, December edition (one of Tennyson's "Arthurian Idylls", later published in Gareth and Lynette 1872)

United States

 * William Cullen Bryant, Poems
 * William Ellery Channing, The Wanderer
 * Bret Harte, East and West Poems
 * John Hay, Pike County Ballads
 * Emma Lazarus, Admetus and Other Poems
 * Joaquin Miller, pen name of Cincinnatus Heine (or Hiner) Miller:
 * Songs of the Sierras
 * Pacific Poems
 * Walt Whitman:
 * Leaves of Grass, fifth edition
 * Passage to India
 * John Greenleaf Whittier, Miriam and Other Poems

Works published in other languages

 * François Coppée, Fais ce que dois , short verse drama inspired by the Franco-Prussian War; France
 * Arthur Rimbaud, Le bateau ivre ("The Drunken Boat"), France

Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * February 3 - Francis Joseph Sherman Canadian poet
 * April 16 – John Millington Synge (died 1909), Irish dramatist, poet, prose writer, collector of folklore and a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre
 * June 17 – James Weldon Johnson (died 1938), African-American author, poet, early civil rights activist, and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance
 * July 3 – William Henry Davies (died 1940), Welsh-born poet and writer who spent most of his life as a tramp in the United States and United Kingdom, but became known as one of the most popular poets of his time
 * July 15 – Kunikida Doppo 國木田 獨歩 (died 1908), Japanese, Meiji period romantic poet and one of the novelists who pioneered naturalism in Japan (surname: Kunikida)
 * September 2 – John Le Gay Brereton (died 1933), Australian poet, critic and academic
 * September 9 – Ralph Hodgson (died 1962), British
 * October 30 – Paul Valéry (died 1945), French philosopher, author and Symbolist poet who also wrote essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music and current events
 * November 1 – Stephen Crane (died 1900), American novelist, poet and journalist
 * Also:
 * Madhavanuj, pen name of Kashinath Hari Modak (died 1917), Indian, Marathi-language poet and translator; a physician

Deaths
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * Alice and Phoebe Cary
 * Charlotte Elliott
 * John Frederick William Herschel
 * Thomas Buchanan Read, American poet
 * James Monroe Whitfield