1816 in Poetry - Events

Events

• This year was known as the "Year Without a Summer" after Mount Tambora had erupted in the Dutch East Indies the previous year and cast enough ash in to the atmosphere to block out the sun and cause abnormal weather across much of Northeastern United States and Northern Europe. This pall of darkness inspired Byron to write his poem, "Darkness" in July.
• Lord Byron separates from his wife then leaves England to tour Europe, 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 took together, Shelley was inspired to write his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Shelley, in turn, influenced Byron's poetry. This new influence showed itself in the third part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron was working on, as well as in Manfred, which he wrote 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 was to transfer his enthusiasm from Keats to Shelley.
• December 30 — Shelley marries Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin after Shelley's first wife, Harriet, drowns herself (her body was found December 10).