1862 in poetry

• February 11 – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on returning home with Algernon Charles Swinburne after a night on the town, finds his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, dead on the floor from an overdose of laudanum.^[1] At her funeral, he places a sheaf of poems (a few years later retrieved) in the coffin.
• December 28 – Walt Whitman moves to Washington, D.C., where he will volunteer in army hospitals.^[2]
• Emily Dickinson's year of greatest poetic productivity.

• Aleardo Aleardi, Canto politico ("Political Songs"), Italy
• Charles Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose, France
• Dalpatram, editor, Kavhadohan, an anthology of Gujarati-language poetry (India)^[8]
• Leconte de Lisle, Poèmes barbares, France
• Henrik Ibsen, Terje Vigen, Norway

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

• January 10 – Hoshino Tenchi 星野天知 (died 1950), Japanese Meiji period poet and martial arts master; a co-founder of Bungakukai literary magazine; 8th Grand Master and a teacher of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu martial-arts school (surname: Hoshino)
• January 12 – Edith Emma Cooper, half of "Michael Field" (died 1913), English
• January 24 – Edith Wharton (died 1937), American fiction writer
• c. January 28 – Ella Rhoads Higginson (died 1940), American
• February 17 – Mori Ōgai 森 鷗外 / 森 鴎外 (died 1922) Japanese physician, translator, novelist and poet (surname: Mori)
• March 2 – John Jay Chapman (died 1923), American writer
• April 24 – A. C. Benson (died 1925), English
• May 22 – John Kendrick Bangs (died 1922), American
• June 6 – Sir Henry Newbolt (died 1938), English
• June 18 – Carolyn Wells (died 1942), American novelist and poet
• August 2 – Duncan Campbell Scott (died 1947), Canadian
• September 28 – W. T. Goodge (died 1909), Australian
• October 29 – John Bernard O'Hara (died 1927), Australian
• November 4 – Jean Blewett (died 1934), Canadian
• November 5 – Thomas William Heney (died 1928), Australian

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

• February 11 – Elizabeth Siddal (born 1829), English artist, artist's model and poet, wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; from an opium overdose
• February 14 – Emily Rebecca Page (born 1834), American poet and editor
• February 21 – Justinus Kerner (born 1786), German poet of the Swabian school and physician
• February 24 – Bernhard Severin Ingemann (born 1789), Danish poet, playwright and historical novelist
• March 13 – Roderick Flanagan (born 1828), Australian
• May 6 – Henry David Thoreau (born 1817), American author, poet, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist; from tuberculosis
• July 5 – Charles Whitehead (born 1804), English poet, novelist and playwright
• August 23 – Friedrich Julius Hammer (born 1810), German poet
• date not known – Gopala Krishna Pattanayak (born 1785), Indian, Oriya-language poet^[9]

• 19th century in poetry
• 19th century in literature
• List of years in poetry
• List of years in literature
• Victorian literature
• French literature of the 19th century
• Poetry