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….
9. Mervyn Peake (1911 - 1968)
A famous novelist, Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form. The writer of the Gormenghast series of books, wrote and painted at School House in Warningcamp near Arundel from 1940 to 1946. Photo: General Photographic Agency
10. Ted Walker (1934-2004)
Prize-winning poet Walker won many prizes, including the Eric Gregory Award (1964) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. Walker was born in Lancing, went to school in Steyning, married in Shoreham and taught in Bognor and Chichester. Fox on a Barn Door, a book of all his work, contains his impressions of the Sussex countryside. Photo: Captive Reader
11. Maureen Duffy (1933 - )
Worthing-born Duffy's covering of such issues as gay rights and animal rights in her work has lead her to receive the Benson Medal for her lifelong writings. Photo: Evening Standard
12. Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (1876 - 1945)
Douglas published several volumes of poetry, ome in a homoerotic Uranian genre, and two books about his relationship with Oscar Wilde. The controversial figure died in Lancing and was buried in Crawley in 1945. Photo: George C. Beresford