Chaucer completes Troilus and Criseyde, his long poem about a legendary love affair in ancient Troy

Chaucer begins an ambitious scheme for 100 Canterbury Tales, of which he completes only 24 by the time of his death

Francois Villon, recently released from prison, writes his Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past

Boiardo publishes a romantic epic, Orlando Innamorato, about Roland's love for a bewitching princess

Ariosto, in Orlando Furioso, tells of Roland's madness when he is abandoned by the pagan princess Angelica

Pierre de Ronsard publishes the first four books of his Odes

Luis de Camoëns publishes The Lusiads, the poem which becomes Portugal's national epic

Tasso, in Gerusalemme Liberata ('Jerusalem Liberated'), turns the first crusade into a romantic epic

English poet Edmund Spenser celebrates the Protestant Elizabeth I as The Faerie Queene

Shakespeare's sonnets, written ten years previously, are published

George Herbert's only volume of poems, The Temple, is published posthumously

John Milton's Lycidas is published in memory of a Cambridge friend, Edward King

The poems of Massachusetts author Anne Bradstreet are published in London under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

Paradise Lost is published, earning its author John Milton just £10

Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock introduces a delicate vein of mock-heroic in English poetry

English poet Thomas Gray publishes his Elegy written in a Country Church Yard

Fingal, supposedly by the medieval Celtic poet Ossian, has a huge and fashionable success but is revealed to be a forgery by James Macpherson

Francis Hopkinson's popular ballad The Battle of the Kegs describes an ingenious American threat to the British navy

US poet Philip Freneau describes in The British Prison Ship the horrors of his experiences as a prisoner

US author Philip Freneau publishes his first collection of poems, dating back to 1771

William Blake publishes Songs of Innocence, a volume of his poems with every page etched and illustrated by himself

Scottish poet Robert Burns publishes Tam o' Shanter, in which a drunken farmer has an alarming encounter with witches

Goethe and Schiller become friends, and together create the movement known as Weimar classicism

William Blake's volume Songs of Innocence and Experience includes his poem 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright'

US author Joel Barlow publishes his mock-heroic poem The Hasty Pudding, inspired by a dish eaten in 1793 in France