The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) founded this day in 1999, with the aim of supporting poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard.
The day offers the opportunities to promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry and honour famous poets from across history.
Poetry is simply defined literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
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It has been apart of human life for most, if not all, of human history and shapes much of understanding of the world around us/
Many famous poets and writers were born or lived in Sussex.
Here are some of the most famous to come from this southern county….
5. William Hayley (1745 - 1820)
Chichester-born Hayley was a friend of artists including William Blake, George Romney, John Flaxman and Joseph Wright of Derby. Hayley won the fame he enjoyed amongst his contemporaries by his poetical Essays and Epistles; a Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter (1778). Photo: Hulton Archive
6. William Collins (1721 - 1759)
William Collins was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century - second only Thomas Gray. His work marks a progression from the Augustan poetry of Alexander Pope's generation and towards the imaginative ideal of the Romantic era. Collins started and ended his life in Chichester. Photo: Hulton Archive
7. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Alfred Lord Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Alfred lived on Blackdown, the highest point in West Sussex, and Aldworth House in Lurgashall. Photo: Rischgitz
8. Percy Shelley (1792 - 1822)
Whilst not achieving fame in his own lifetime, Percy Bysshe Shelley has become one of the major English Romantic poets; becoming an influence for generations of poets including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. Shelley grew up at Warnham near Horsham and has had his life celebrated in Horsham Musuem. Photo: Hulton Archive