January 11 – Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" appears in Leigh Hunt's weekly The Examiner (London; p. 24) under the pen name "Glirastes". Horace Smith's contribution to the same informal sonnet-writing competition, "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below" is published on February 1 under his initials.
June–August – Keats with his friend Charles Armitage Brown makes a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland and the English Lake District. On July 11 while in Scotland he visits Burns Cottage, the birthplace of Robert Burns (1759–1796). Before Keats arrives, he writes to a friend "one of the pleasantest means of annulling self is approaching such a shrine as the cottage of Burns — we need not think of his misery — that is all gone — bad luck to it — I shall look upon it all with unmixed pleasure."[7] but his encounter with the cottage's alcoholic custodian returns him to thoughts of misery.[8] On August 2 he climbs to the summit of Ben Nevis, on which he writes a sonnet.[9]
December – Keats is invited to move into Brown's home at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, at this time a pastoral suburb north of London, where he will write much of his most famous work.[14]
^Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Hamlet". Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets. Shakespeare and his Critics. Archived from the original on 2014-01-13. Retrieved 2014-01-07.