World Poetry Day 2021: Poetry goes on to show that despite the divisions and disparities, much of what we feel and experience is similar and so is our relation with the nature. On this day every year, poets are honoured, attempts are made at reviving oral traditions and promoting the art of reading and writing poetry.
When is World Poetry Day?
World Poetry Day falls on March 21st. The purpose of this holiday is to promote the writing, reading, teaching and publishing of poetry throughout the world. It’s also a day to give recognition to international, national and regional poetry movements. This holiday has been celebrated since its inception in 1999.
World Poetry Day: History
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided to celebrate World Poetry Day annually on March 21 during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999.
It was earlier celebrated in many places in October, which continued even after the UNESCO’s 1999 session. Some countries still celebrate poetry day on October 15, on the birthday of Roman poet Virgil who is famous for his epic poem Aeneid.
World Poetry Day 2021: 5 classic poems by Rabindranath Tagore
World Poetry Day: Significance
On this day, children are introduced to the art of poems. Several government bodies and cultural authorities organize exhibitions of poems and their creators. Many poets hold signing events and recitals. Shows invite poets to talk about their work and spread awareness regarding the form. The day salutes small, independent publishers who believe in unknown poets and bring their work in front of the global audience.
Schools and other educational institutes do hold poetry competitions to observe the World Poetry Day.
Happy World Poetry Day Quotes, Wishes
World Poetry Day Quotes
- “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is the painting that is felt rather than seen.” – Leonardo da Vinci
- “Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” – William Shakespeare
- “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” – Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
- “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, homesickness, a lovesickness.” – Robert Frost
- “Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” – Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel
- “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” – G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions
- “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” – Victor Hugo
- “What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.” – Walt Whitman
- “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
- “My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing.” – Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems
- “Summer night even the stars are whispering to each other.” – Kobayashi Issa
- “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” – Novalis
- “Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
- “Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.” – Jack Kerouac
- “Love consists of this: two solitude’s that meet, protect and greet each other. ” – Rainer Maria Rilke
- “She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes…” – Lord Byron - “April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.” – T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land - “I know you’re tired but come, this is the way.” – Jalalu’l-din Rumi
- “I don’t care what you say to me. I care what you share with me.” -Santosh Kalwar
- “Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.” – Virginia Woolf, Orlando
- “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
- “Poetry is just so emo,” he said. “Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.” – John Green, Paper Towns
- “you not wanting me was the beginning of me wanting myself thank you” – Nayyirah Waheed
- “Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.” – Rabindranath Tagore
- “Years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute.” – Edgar Allen Poe
- “The poetry of the earth is never dead.” – John Keats
Best Poetry Day Quotes
- “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” – John Keats
- “Love recognises no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” – Maya Angelou
- “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” – William Wordsworth
- “Love recognises no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” – Maya Angelou
- “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” – Sylvia Plath
- “There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any courses like a page of prancing Poetry.” – Emily Dickenson
- am two fo” I ols, I know, For loving, and for saying so in whining poetry.” – John Donne
- “An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.” – Langston Hughes
- “The greater gift of universal wisdom and beauty that we have strived to honour through our work includes the legacies of world artistic and spiritual traditions.”
- “Poetry is the revolution and the raising of consciousness”
- “Poetry is something best words in the best order”
- “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of History. – Derek Walcott
- Not deep the poet sees, but wide.” – Matthew Arnold
- “He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.” – George Sand
Famous Poetry Quotes
- “To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.” – Thomas Hardy
- “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” – Gustave Flaubert
- “Prose = words in their best order; Poetry = the best words in the best order.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own.” – Salvatore Quasimodo
- “Poetry is the deification of reality.” – Edith Sitwell
- “A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.” – Yevgeny Yevtushenko
- “There are two ways of disliking poetry. One way is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.” – Oscar Wilde
- “In the house of poetry, nothing endures that is not written with blood to be heard with blood.” – Pablo Neruda
- “For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.” – Robert Frost
- “Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” – Carl Sandburg
- “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.” – John Adams
- “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” – T. S. Eliot
- “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson
- “As a poet, I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can’t.” – Sylvia Plath
- “Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.” – Robert Frost
- “An age that is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.” – Raymond Chandler
- “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” – Carl Sandburg
- “Poetry is life distilled.” – Gwendolyn Brooks
- “Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting.” – Simonides
- “Prose is a museum where all the old weapons of poetry are kept.” – T. E. Hulme
- “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms to be struck by lightning 5 or 6 times.” – Randall Jarrell
- “Poetry is talking on tiptoe.” – George Meredith
- “Poetry is a religion with no hope.” – Jean Cocteau
