February 29, March 14 and April 18 - Susanna Wheatley attempts to get subscribers for a book of poems by her slave,
Phillis Wheatley, by advertising in the Boston Censor, but the effort fails, largely because not enough readers believe that a black person has enough talent to write poetry.
September 12 - The
Göttinger Hainbund of German poets is formed at a midnight ritual in an oaken grove.
October 4 - Because many white people in colonial
Massachusetts find it hard to believe that a black woman could have enough talent to write poetry,
Phillis Wheatley is brought before a panel of eminent intellectuals in Boston who are gathered together to question her.[1][2] The group includes
John Erving, Reverend
Charles Chauncey,
John Hancock,
Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts, his lieutenant governor,
Andrew Oliver, the Rev.
Mather Byles, Joseph Green, the Rev.
Samuel Cooper,
James Bowdoin and
Samuel Mather. They conclude she has in fact written the poems ascribed to her and sign an
attestation which is added to the preface to her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral published in
Aldgate,
London in
1773 after printers in Boston refuse to publish the text.
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[4]
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)[4]
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[4]
October 21 -
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (died
1834),
English Romantic poet, literary critic and philosopher, a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the
Lake Poets
Sturm und Drang (the conventional translation is "Storm and Stress"; a more literal translation, however, might be "storm and urge", "storm and longing", "storm and drive" or "storm and impulse"), a movement in
German literature (including poetry) and music from the late 1760s through the early 1780s
^Ellis Cashmore, review of The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, Nellie Y. McKay and Henry Louis Gates, eds., New Statesman, April 25, 1997.
^Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah, Basic Civitas Books, 1999, page 1171.
^
abcdefLudwig, Richard M., and Clifford A. Nault, Jr., Annals of American Literature: 1602–1983, 1986, New York: Oxford University Press
^
abcdefghCox, Michael, editor, The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004,
ISBN0-19-860634-6