In its own words, UNESCO's World Poetry Day (held each year on 21 March) "celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity."

"UNESCO first adopted 21 March as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard..." Celebrating this year's event, Cambridge has curated a new collection of book chapters and journal articles from across the breadth of our publishing in poetry, alongside a smaller collection from leading Literature journal PMLA. Where not already open access, they are free to read until the end of April 2024. Explore also a catalogue of key Cambridge Books and Journals.

Free-access book chapters and
journal articles from Cambridge

The October 2023 issue of PMLA offers a wide-ranging selection of material on poetry: an essay on the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen; a look at metaphrasis in Renaissance poetics, by way of a single stanza from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene; a comparison of two seventeenth-century poets, five thousand miles apart and unknown to each other, confronting the same philosophical question; and an introduction to and translation of the only known poem by the Senegalese author Mariama Bâ. 

Further on, our full research collection spans the breadth of our publishing in poetry, across both Cambridge Books and Journals.