1656 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

Events

 * This year in England, John Phillips, a nephew of John Milton, is summoned before the privy council for his share in a book of licentious poems, Sportive Wit, suppressed by the authorities but almost immediately replaced by a similar collection, Wit and Drollery.
 * Hallgrímur Pétursson begins work on his Passion Hymns

Works published

 * Margaret Cavendish, Lady Newcastle, Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, fiction, poetry and prose
 * Abraham Cowley:
 * Miscellanies, including "On the Death of Mr. Crashaw"
 * Poems
 * Pindaric Odes
 * Sir John Denham, translator, The Destruction of Troy, published anonymously, partial translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2
 * William Davenant, Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems
 * William Drummond, Poems
 * John Evelyn, translator, An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus, translation of the Latin of Lucretius' De rerum natura, with both English and Latin; including commendatory poems by Sir Richard Brown, Edmund Waller and Christopher Wase (in Latin); this work was the first attempt to translate the work into English; Evelyn translated only the first book after realizing that he didn't have the ability to write a translation, as he put it, "to equal the elegancy of the original", although some of his friends warned him of the danger of the atheistic work to his morals, spirituality and reputation
 * Richard Flecknoe, The Diarium, or Journall, anonymously published
 * Mary Oxlie, authored a commendatory poem of fifty-two lines, To William Drummond of Hawthornden

Births
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * Lady Mary Chudleigh (died 1710), English poet and essayist
 * Henry Hall (died 1707), English poet and composer

Deaths
Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
 * Joseph Hall (born 1574), English bishop, satirist, moralist, and poet
 * Johan van Heemskerk (born 1597), Dutch poet
 * Johann Klaj (born 1616), German poet