21st March: World Poetry Day

 April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922).

World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. UNESCO first adopted 21st March as World Poetry Day in 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.

World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media.

2nd and 3rd year CSE students celebrate this day by reading poetry in our studio.

Special thanks to those poets mentioned in our podcast: William Shakespeare, Elisabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and Dylan Thomas.