# 1899 in poetry

   Take up the White Man's burden,
       Send forth the best ye breed —
   Go, bind your sons to exile
       To serve your captives' need;
— Opening lines of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden, first published this year
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

## Events

* February 4 – Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" is first published in The Times. A response to the United States occupation of the Philippine Islands, and exhorting members of the White race to be responsible for benevolent civilising of the world's "non-white" people, the poem is reprinted in The New York Sun the next day.
* March 20 – Welsh "tramp-poet" W. H. Davies loses his foot trying to jump a freight train at Renfrew, Ontario.
* William Hughes Mearns writes "Antigonish" this year; it won't be published until 1922.
* Romesh Chunder Dutt's translation of the Ramayana into English verse is first published, in London.
* Shinshisha ("New Poetry Society") founded by Yosano Tekkan in Japan.

## Works published
### Australia

* W. T. Goodge, Hits! Skits! and Jingles!

### Canada

* Frances Jones Bannerman, Milestones. London.
* William Wilfred Campbell, Beyond the Hills of Dream. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.
* Fidelis, Lays of the "True North," and Other Canadian Poems.
* John Frederic Herbin, The Marshlands
* Archibald Lampman, Alcyone, including "City of the End of Things", the author died while the book was being printed.
* Thomas O'Hagan, Songs of the Settlement
* Frederick George Scott, Poems Old and New (Toronto: William Briggs).
* Francis Sherman, 'The Deserted City: Stray Sonnets. Boston: Copeland and Day.
* Arthur Stringer, The Loom of Destiny.

#### Anthologies

* Northland Lyrics, William Carman Roberts, Theodore Roberts & Elizabeth Roberts Macdonald; selected and arranged with a prologue by Charles G.D. Roberts and an epilogue by Bliss Carman. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. ISBN 0-665-12501-1

### United Kingdom

* Hilaire Belloc, A Moral Alphabet
* Laurence Binyon, Second Book of London Visions (see also First Book of London Visions 1896)
* Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Satan Absolved
* Gordon Bottomley, Poems at White-Nights
* Robert Buchanan, The New Rome: Poems and ballads of our empire
* John Davidson, The Last Ballad, and Other Poems
* Lord Alfred Douglas (anonymously in 1st edition), The City of the Soul
* Ernest Dowson, Decorations: in Verse and Prose
* Rudyard Kipling:
** "The Absent-Minded Beggar"
** "The White Man's Burden", appears first in McClure's Magazine in the United States; it is parodied this same year in "The Brown Man's Burden", by Henry Labouchère in Truth, a publication in London; the parody is reprinted in the United States in Literary Digest 18 (February 25)
* Dora Sigerson, Ballads and Poems
* Arthur Symons:
** Images of Good and Evil
** The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first collected edition of essays
* W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds including "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"; Irish poet published in the United Kingdom, (John Lane/Bodley Head)

### United States

* Stephen Crane, War is Kind
* Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of the Hearthside, which included his poem "Sympathy"
* Hamlin Gillette, The Trail of the Goldseekers
* Louise Imogen Guiney, The Martyrs' Idyl
* Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden", appears first in McClure's; it is parodied this same year in "The Brown Man's Burden", by Henry Labouchère in Truth, a publication in London; the parody is reprinted in the United States in Literary Digest 18 (February 25)
* Edwin Markham, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems
* Howard Llewellyn Swisher, Briar Blossoms: Being a Collection of a Few Verses and Some Prose
* Henry Timrod (died 1867), Complete Poems

### Other in English

* John Le Gay Brereton, Landlopers, mostly prose, based on a walking tour with Dowell Philip O'Reilly; Australia
* W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds including "Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"; Irish poet published in the United Kingdom, The Wind Among the Reeds, (John Lane/Bodley Head)

## Works published in other languages
### France

* Francis Jammes:
** Le Poète et l'oiseau ("The Poet and the Bird")
** La Jeune Fille nue, France
* Stéphane Mallarmé (died 1898), Poésies, originally published 1877, new edn with commentary by the poet
* Oscar Milosz, also known as O. V. de L. Milosz, Le Poème des décadences

### Other languages

* José Santos Chocano, La epopeya del Morro, Peru
* Stefan George, Teppich des Lebens ("The Carpet of Life"); German
* Gregorio Martínez Sierra, Diálogos fantásticos ("Fantastic Dialogues"), Spain

## Births

Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
* January 23 – Carlo Betocchi (died 1986), Italian poet
* January 26 – May Miller (died 1995) African American poet, playwright and educator
* February 17 – Jibanananda Das (died 1954), popular Bengali poet
* March 7 – Jun Ishikawa 石川淳 pen name of Ishikawa Kiyoshi, Ishikawa (died 1987), Japanese, Shōwa period modernist author, translator and literary critic
* March 25 – Jacques Audiberti (died 1965), French playwright, poet, novelist and exponent of the Theatre of the Absurd
* March 27 – Francis Ponge (died 1988), French academic, journalist and poet
* May 18 – D. Gwenallt Jones (died 1968), Welsh poet
* May 24
** Kazi Nazrul Islam (died 1976), Bengali poet and composer best known as the Bidrohi Kobi ("Rebel Poet"), popular among Bengalis and considered the national poet of Bangladesh
** Henri Michaux (died 1984), Belgian, French-language artist, writer and poet who became a French citizen
* May 27 – Raymond Knister died (1932), Canadian poet, novelist and short story writer
* June 6 – Hildegarde Flanner (died 1987), American poet, author and activist
* June 8 – Kaoru Maruyama 丸山 薫 (died 1974), Japanese
* July 4 – Benjamin Péret (died 1959), French poet and writer
* July 7 – Margaret Larkin (died 1967), American poet
* July 21 – Hart Crane (died 1932), American poet
* August 1 – F. R. Scott (died 1985), Canadian poet, intellectual and constitutional expert
* September 30 – Hendrik Marsman (died 1940), Dutch poet
* August 5 – Sakae Tsuboi 壺井栄 (died 1967), Japanese novelist and poet
* November 19 – Allen Tate (died 1979), American poet and member of the Fugitives and later the Southern Agrarians.
* December 9 – Léonie Adams (died 1988), American poet and Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress
* Date not known:
** Jammuneshwar Khataniyar (died 1920), Indian, Assamese-language poet; a woman
** Dimbeshwar Neog (died 1966), Indian, Assamese-language poet
** Constance Woodrow (died 1937), English-born Canadian poet

## Deaths

Birth years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
* February 10 – Archibald Lampman, 37 (born 1861), Canadian poet who dies while his book, Alcyone, is being printed (see "Works", above)
* April 16 – Emilio Jacinto, 23 (born 1875) Filipino revolutionary general and poet, of malaria
* April 26 – Dragotin Kette, 23 (born 1876), Slovene poet, of TB
* July 20 – Frances Laughton Mace, 63 (born 1836) American poet
* November 16 – Vincas Kudirka, 40 (born 1858), Lithuanian physician, poet and national hero, of TB
* November 25 – Robert Lowry, 73 (born 1826), American hymnodist
* December 1 – Dolores Cabrera y Heredia, 71 (born 1828), Spanish Romantic poet and novelist, member of Hermandad Lírica