Poetry
National Poetry Day is celebrated in Britain to share creativity through words. Photo: Getty

World Poetry Day is celebrated every year on March 21 and was declared by UNESCO in 1999 to commemorate poetry, free speech and literature.

According to the former UNESCO director-general, Irina Bokova, “By paying tribute to the men and women whose only instrument is free speech, who imagine and act, UNESCO recognizes in poetry its value as a symbol of the human spirit’s creativity. By giving form and words to that which has none - such as the unfathomable beauty that surrounds us, the immense suffering and misery of the world - poetry contributes to the expansion of our common humanity, helping to increase its strength, solidarity and self-awareness.”

To commemorate poetry and World Poetry Day 2019, here are 10 quotes from famous poets:

  1. “Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute”- Edgar Allen Poe
  2. “A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day”- Emily Dickinson
  3. “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words”- Robert Frost
  4. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing”- Sylvia Plath
  5. “Faith is a bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark”- Rabindranath Tagore
  6. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”- William Wordsworth
  7. “The poetry of the earth is never dead”- John Keats
  8. “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice”- T.S. Elliot
  9. “I exist as I am, that is enough”- Walt Whitman
  10. “Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly”- Langston Hughes.
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