Tuesday, March 21 is World Poetry Day. The Day “celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity,” according to United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the day was hatched and adopted by UNESCO in 1999, on the occasion of its 30th General Conference held in Paris to “give fresh recognition and impetus to national, regional and international poetry movements.”
Poets, both past and present, are honored, and oral traditions of reciting poetry are revived. Reading, writing, and teaching poetry are encouraged, and converged with other mediums of expression such as music, dance, painting, and more.
The organisation hoped to inspire the celebration of poetry all over the world, preserve endangered languages, and stimulate poetic expression through this day.
Poetry uses rhythms and imagery to elicit emotion and the imagination of the reader. Poetry can rhyme, using what are called meters of long and short syllables. Some poetry, written in what’s called ‘free verse,’ doesn’t employ rhyme or meters.
Poems are broken into stanzas, which are like paragraphs, and can be up to 12 lines long. It is believed that the first known poem appeared 4,000 years ago in Babylon. Today, countless types of poems are available to enjoy, including haikus, limericks, sonnets and ballads.