1790 in poetry

• March - Jens Baggesen returns to Denmark. After ridiculing his fellow Danes in his poem, Holger the Dane and leaving the country for Germany, Baggensen proceeded to Switzerland and became a good friend of the Swiss poet Johan Kaspar Lavater and a leader in the Sturm und Drang movement.^[1]
• May 21 - Thomas Warton dies. He is succeeded as Poet Laureate of Great Britain by writer and police magistrate Henry James Pye (who has just retired as a Member of Parliament) following William Hayley's refusal of the office.

• Joanna Baillie, published anonymously, Poems^[2]
• William Blake, published anonymously, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, illuminated book with 27 relief-etched plates
• Robert Burns, "Tam o' Shanter" Scottish, written
• Thomas Edwards (Twm o'r Nant), Gardd o Gerddi, Welsh
• George Ellis, ed., Specimens of the Early English Poets
• Anne Francis, anonymously published "by a lady", then reissued this year under the author's name, Miscellaneous Poems^[2]
• Robert Merry, The Laurel of Liberty^[2]
• William Sotheby, Poems^[2]
• Ann Yearsley, Stanzas of Woe^[2]

• Peter Markoe, the Reconciliation; or, The Triumph of Nature, an unproduced opera in verse^[3]
• Sarah Wentworth Morton, published under the name "Philenia, a Lady of Boston", Ouabi; or, The Virtues of Nature: An Indian Tale in Four Cantos,^[4] narrative poem portraying a love triangle between an Indian chief, his wife and an aristocrat from Europe; set to music in 1793 by Hans Graham; the poem inspired Louis James Bacon to write the play The American Indian in 1795^[5]
• Mercy Otis Warren, Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous,^[4] the first work printed under the author's own name; includes verse tragedies; many of the poems promote republican virtues and show women as moral authorities^[5]

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

• January 1 – James Wills (died 1868), Irish writer and poet
• January 10 – Anders Abraham Grafström (died 1870), Swedish historian, priest and poet
• July 8 – Fitz-Greene Halleck (died 1867), American
• October 21 – Alphonse de Lamartine (died 1869), French writer, poet and politician
• date unknown – Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq (died 1854), Urdu poet

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

• May 21 – Thomas Warton (born 1728), English literary historian, critic and Poet Laureate of Great Britain
• July 25 – William Livingston (born 1723), English Colonial American public official, poet and writer
• August 22 – Andrew Macdonald (born 1757), Scottish clergyman, poet and playwright

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