1845 in Poetry - Events

Events

• January 10—Robert Browning, 32, and Elizabeth Barrett, 38, begin their correspondence when she receives a note declaring "I love you" from Browning, a little-known poet whose verses she had praised in her poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship".
• April - Nathaniel Hawthorne first publishes "P.'s Correspondence", a short story and example of alternative history in which many poets and other writers and political figures who had died in real life (such as John Keats, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron) are described as still living, and vice versa. The story, which appeared in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, was later included in Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).