1816 in poetry

• This year is known as the "Year Without a Summer" after Mount Tambora had erupted in the Dutch East Indies the previous year and cast enough ash into the atmosphere to block out the sun and cause abnormal weather across much of Northern Europe and the Northeastern United States. This pall of darkness inspires Byron to write his poem "Darkness" in July.
• Lord Byron separates from his wife and in April leaves England to tour continental Europe (never returning), settling in the summer in Switzerland, at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva; in late May he meets, and soon becomes friends with, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin. Regular conversation with Byron has an invigorating effect on Shelley's poetry. While on a boating tour the two take together, Shelley is inspired to write his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Shelley, in turn, influences Byron's poetry. This new influence shows itself in the third part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron is working on, as well as in Manfred, which he writes in the autumn of this year.
• In late August Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin return to England from Switzerland, taking with them some of Byron's manuscripts for his publisher.
• Shelley is introduced to John Keats in Hampstead towards the end of the year by their mutual friend, Leigh Hunt, who is to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley.
• December 30 — Shelley marries his mistress Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London following the suicides on October 9 of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay (by laudanum in Swansea), and on December 10 of his pregnant estranged first wife, Harriet (by drowning in The Serpentine).

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

• January 16 – Frances Browne (died 1879), Irish poet
• February 18 – Ferdinand Dugué (died 1913), French poet and playwright
• April 21 – Charlotte Brontë (died 1855), English novelist and poet
• April 22 – Philip James Bailey (died 1902), English Spasmodic poet
• April 23 – Douglas Smith Huyghue (died 1891), Canadian and Australian poet, fiction writer, essayist and artist
• April 29 – (Charles William) Shirley Brooks (died 1874), English journalist and poet
• May 2 – Charles Heavysege (died 1876), English-born Canadian poet and dramatist
• August 31 – Josiah D. Canning, born Josiah Dean Cannon (died 1892), American poet
• October 26 – Philip Pendleton Cooke (died 1850), American lawyer and poet

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

• June 16 – Hugh Henry Brackenridge (born 1748), American writer, poet, lawyer, judge and Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice[4]
• July 7 – Richard Brinsley Sheridan (born 1751), Irish playwright, Whig statesman, writer and poet
• October 27 – Santō Kyōden 山東京伝, pen name of Samuru Iwase 岩瀬醒, also known popularly as "Kyōya Denzō" 京屋伝蔵 (born 1761), Japanese Edo period poet, writer and artist; brother of Santō Kyōzan

• Poetry
• 19th century in literature
• 19th century in poetry
• List of years in poetry
• List of years in literature
• List of poets
• Golden Age of Russian Poetry (1800–1850)
• Romantic poetry
• 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