1874 in poetry

"God grant that the reader, emboldened and having become at present as fierce as what he is reading, find, without loss of bearings, his way, his wild and treacherous passage through the desolate swamps of these sombre, poison-soaked pages; for, unless he should bring to his reading a rigorous logic and a sustained mental effort at least as strong as his distrust, the lethal fumes of this book shall dissolve his soul as water does sugar."

- Opening passage of Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse)

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

United Kingdom

 * Alfred Austin, The Tower of Babel
 * Robert William Dale, The English Hymn Book
 * Edward Bulwer Lytton, Fables in Song
 * Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Music and Moonlight
 * James Thomson, "The City of Dreadful Night," published in National Reformer, and later in 1880

United States

 * Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Cloth of Gold and Other Poems
 * William Cullen Bryant, Among the Trees
 * Mary Mapes Dodge, Rhymes and Jingles
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
 * Editor, Poems of Places, anthology, United States
 * The Hanging of the Crane
 * Mary Ashley Townsend, The Captain's Story

France

 * François Coppée, Le Cahier rouge
 * Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, France
 * Comte de Lautréamont, pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, Les Chants de Maldoror, prose poems full of Gothic horror (first published in full this year; originally published in parts in 1868 and 1869); France

Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * January 16 – Robert William Service (died 1958) a Scots-Canadian poet who wrote "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee"
 * February 3 – Gertrude Stein (died 1946), American writer, poet and catalyst in the development of modern art and literature, who spent most of her life in France
 * February 9 – Amy Lowell (died 1925), American poet of the imagist school who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926
 * February 22 – Kyoshi Takahama 高浜 虚子, pen name of Kiyoshi Takahama (died 1959), Japanese, Shōwa period poet; close disciple of Masaoka Shiki (surname: Takahama)
 * March 26 – Robert Frost (died 1963), American poet
 * April 27 – Maurice Baring (died 1945), English poet, novelist, translator, essayist, travel writer, and war correspondent
 * May 29 – G. K. Chesterton (died 1936), influential English writer, journalist, poet, biographer, Christian apologist short story writer and novelist
 * June 20 – Trumbull Stickney (died 1904), American classical scholar and poet best known for his sonnets
 * August 19 – A. H. Reginald Buller (died 1944), a British/Canadian mycologist mainly known as a researcher of fungi and wheat rust who also wrote limericks, some of which were published in Punch
 * September 8 – Yone Noguchi 野口米次郎 (died 1947), Japanese poet, fiction writer, essayist, and literary critic in both English and Japanese; father of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi
 * November 30 – Lucy Maud Montgomery (died 1942), Canadian author and poet best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables
 * Also:
 * Ursula Bethell (died 1945) (New Zealand)
 * Gordon Bottomley (died 1948), English poet known particularly for his verse dramas
 * Kalapi (died 1900), Indian, Gujarati-language poet
 * R. H. Long (died 19487), Australian
 * Ridgely Torrence (died 1950), American
 * J. W. Gordon (Jim Grahame) (died 1949), Australian
 * Stanley de Vere Alexander Julius
 * uncertain year of birth – Josephine Peabody, American poet and playwright

Deaths
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * August 22 – Sydney Thompson Dobell, 50, English poet and critic
 * October 5 – Barry Cornwall, 86, English poet.
 * October 5 – Bryan Procter (born 1787), English poet
 * Also:
 * Charles Shirley Brooks, English journalist, novelist and poet
 * Ōtagaki Rengetsu 太田垣蓮月 (born1791), Buddhist nun, widely regarded to have been one of the greatest Japanese poets of the 19th century; potter, painter and expert calligrapher