Every year, on March 21st, World Poetry Day is celebrated. The day was created by UNESCO in 1999 during its 30th General Conference in Paris with the goal of advancing poetry reading, writing, publishing, and instruction globally. It acknowledges poetry as an essential linguistic and cultural expression medium that promotes creativity, protects endangered languages, and promotes intercultural communication.
The boom in the digital era has made poetry one of the most underused and undervalued media in modern culture. Tweets, Instagram, and Facebook posts have taken away all the focus and attention. Poetry is something that is taught from childhood. Poetry teaches children the art of creative expression, which is extremely absent in the educational environment of the new age.
Poetry is one of the more powerful forms of writing, because the words don’t sound the same or mean the same; many consider poetry mysterious art. The word pattern sounds fresh and melodious. Through recognizing World Poetry Day, March 21, UNESCO celebrates poetry’s special ability to capture the human mind’s creative spirit. One of the Day’s main goals is to foster linguistic diversity through poetic expression, giving endangered languages the ability to be heard in their communities.
World Poetry Day is the opportunity to honor authors, to restore oral traditions of poetry recitals, to promote poetry reading, writing, and teaching, to facilitate fusion of poetry and other arts including theater, dance, music, and drawing, and to raise media exposure. Uniqueness is an element of the linguistic language that attracts readers, spectators, and speakers towards poetry.
Theme of World Poetry Day 2025
As per the online sources this year the theme of World Poetry day 2025 is “Poetry and Peace and Unity.”
Poetry’s vocabulary varies from that of other literary genres. In other words, poetry’s grammar is unique. Poetic language is very different from ordinary language. Writing poetry calls for us to be open and honest about our thoughts, so that we are able to express them through pen and paper. Throughout the struggles and wars, the powerful healing qualities of poetry were recorded to create an emotional connection between people.
Each form of poetry is special, but each of these expresses the universal experience of humanity, the desire for imagination, which crosses all time boundaries and limits, and the constant affirmation of humanity as one single family. This is poetry’s energy.
With more than 200,000 verses and nearly 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem in the world, four times that of the Ramayana and ten times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined. The Gilgamesh Epic is considered the oldest known poem in Egypt, together with the Rig Vedas of Hinduism and the Egyptian Song of Weaver.
Every two weeks, one language is getting extinct, and by the end of this century, half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will be extinct. With the loss of these languages, we also lose their speakers and poetry practices. People still love poetry, but in the past two decades it has declined slowly. Nowadays, poetry is less common than jazz, according to the latest numbers. It is not so popular as music, and only about half as popular as knitting.
In today’s market, a poetry book luckily sells 5,000-6,000 copies; the decline is not because of the many talented contemporary authors, but rather because poetry in its traditional form, with little publicity and an overdose of TV, music, ,social media, and the Internet, leads to its decline. Practiced across history—in every community and on every continent—poetry is a powerful tool for discussion and spreading humanity and peace all over the world. It needs to be restored once again among the younger generation.
Swikriti
