This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1804.

• March 17 – The first performance of Friedrich Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell takes place at Weimar under the direction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.^[1]
• April 4 – Samuel Taylor Coleridge sets sail on The Speedwell for the Mediterranean. In Malta, he obtains employment as Acting Public Secretary at Attard.^[2]
• April 15 – John Keats' father, a stable worker, dies of a fractured skull, after falling from his horse while returning from visiting John at school.^[3]
• unknown dates
  • James Mill's pamphlet critical of the corn trade, An Essay on the Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain, is published.^[4]
  • William Wordsworth writes his best-known poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", describing a scene he witnessed two years earlier.^[5][6]
  • German Gerhard Bonnier begins a publishing business in Copenhagen (Denmark) by issuing Underfulde og sandfærdige kriminalhistorier, origin of the Swedish Bonnier Group.^[7]

• Mir Amman – Bagh o Buhar, a Translation into the Hindoostanee Tongue of the Celebrated Persian Tale "Qissui Chuhar Durwesh" "by Meer Ummun"
• Sophie Ristaud Cottin – Malvina
• Rachel Hunter -The Unexpected Legacy
• William Henry Ireland – The Sepulchral Summons
• Mary Meeke
  • Amazement
  • The Nine Days' Wonder
• Amelia Opie – Adeline Mowbray
• Ōta Nanpo (大田 南畝) and others – Shokusanjin ennyo meisekishu (Collection of Shokusanjin memorabilia)
• Anna Maria Porter – The Lake of Killarney

• François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil
  • Elmonde, ou la Fille de l'hospice (Edmonde, the charity girl)
  • Jules, ou le Toit paternel (Jules, or Under his father's roof)
• Maria Edgeworth – Popular Tales
• Eliza Fenwick – Mary and Her Cat
• Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor – Original Poems for Infant Minds by several young persons, Vol. 1

• Richard Cumberland – The Sailor's Daughter
• Thomas Dibdin
  • Guilty or Not Guilty
  • The Will for the Deed
• Francis Ludlow Holt – The Land We Live In
• Frederick Reynolds – The Blind Bargain
• Friedrich von Schiller – Wilhelm Tell
• Friedrich Hölderlin – translations of the dramas of Sophocles (published)

• William Blake – Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
• William Lisle Bowles – The Spirit of Discovery
• Kirsha Danilov – The Ancient Russian Poems

• Thomas Brown – Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect
• John Wilson Croker – Familiar Epistles to J. F. Jones, Esquire, on the State of the Irish Stage
• Jakob Friedrich Fries – System der Philosophie als evidente Wissenschaft
• Jacques Labillardière – Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen
• James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale – Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth

• July 1 – George Sand (Lucile Aurore Dupin), French novelist and memoirist (died 1876)
• July 4 – Nathaniel Hawthorne, American novelist (died 1864)
• August 8 – Countess Dash, French writer (died 1872)
• September 8 – Eduard Mörike, German poet (died 1875)
• November 6 – Benjamin Hall Kennedy, English classicist (died 1880)
• December 10 – Eugène Sue, French novelist (died 1857)
• December 21 – Benjamin Disraeli, English novelist and prime minister (died 1881)

• January 4 – Charlotte Lennox, English novelist and playwright (born c. 1730)
• January 11 – James Tytler, Scottish American editor of Encyclopædia Britannica (born 1745)
• February 6 – Joseph Priestley, English natural philosopher and theologian (born 1733)
• February 12 – Immanuel Kant, German philosopher (born 1724)
• February 19 – Philip Yorke, Welsh antiquary and genealogist (born 1743)
• April 3 – Jędrzej Kitowicz, Polish historian and diarist (born c. 1727)
• April 27 – Jonathan Boucher, English philologist (born 1738)
• May 3 – Celestyn Czaplic, Polish poet and politician (born 1723)
• July 16 – Jean-Louis de Lolme, Swiss political theorist (born 1741)
• August 9 – Robert Potter, English translator, poet and cleric (born 1721)
• August 13 – Anica Bošković, Ragusan writer (born 1714)
• October 30 – Samuel Ayscough, English librarian and indexer (born 1745)^[8]
• November 5 – Betje Wolff, Dutch novelist (born 1738)
• November 23 – Richard Graves, English poet and novelist (born 1715)
• December 9 – Wilhelm Abraham Teller, German theologian (born 1734)
• December – John Boydell, English Shakespeare illustrator and engraver (born 1720)