8 July – Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from setting up The Liberal in Livorno to Lerici on the Ligurian Sea of Italy, is drowned as his boat, the Don Juan, sinks in a storm. His decomposed body, washed ashore ten days later on the beach near Viareggio, is identified by a copy of Keats's Lamia and Isabella in the jacket pocket and cremated there in the presence of his friends Lord Byron and the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, who claims to have seized Shelley's heart from the flames. He gives it to Mary Shelley, who keeps it for the rest of her life. Shelley's ashes are interred at the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, where Keats was buried the year before.
The Vision of Judgment, published anonymously as by "Quevedo Redivivus" in the first number of The Liberal, written in response to Southey's A Vision of Judgement1821;[1] publisher John Hunt omits Byron's preface justifying the attack on Southey, indicating to Byron that the omission results from Byron's regular publisher John Murray withholding it when he forwarded the poem to Hunt.
Hew Ainslie, published anonymously A Pilgrimage to the Land of Burns, a travel diary of a tour of Scotland with elaborate descriptions of the scenery and with poetry inspired by the trip, published the same year as the author migrated to the United States[2]
McDonald Clarke, Elixir of Moonshine, Being a Collection of Prose and Poetry by the Mad Poet, including the couplet "Now twilight lets her curtain down / And Pins it with a star." Clarke was known as "the Mad Poet of Broadway" for his eccentric behaviour, with impulsive, dramatic reactions to music, fashion and society, although his mild insanity worsened later.[2]
James Lawson, "Ontwa, the Son of the Forest", describing the life of Erie Indians, including notes by Lewis Cass, territorial governor of Michigan; the poem was later included in Columbian Lyre; or, Specimens of Transatlantic Poetry, published in Glasgow 1828.[2]
James McHenry, The Pleasures of Friendship, short lyric poems and a 1,200-line title poem; nine more editions of the book appeared in the author's lifetime, each with added minor poems[2]
Weimar Classicism period in German poetry, commonly seen to have begun in 1788 and ended in 1805, with the death of Friedrich Schiller, or 1832, with that of Goethe