Today is National Poetry Day, and if the title of this message hasn’t given you a clue, then the subject of this year’s festivities is water.

National Poetry Day is a nationwide celebration of poetry for everyone, everywhere, which falls every year on the first Thursday of October. Since it was first launched in 1994, the day has been marked by a nationwide celebration of all things poetic. From 1999 onwards, National Poetry Day has been loosely “themed” – the theme is not prescriptive but it serves to kick start inspiration. For 2013, the theme is “water, water everywhere” in homage to one of the nation’s best-known lines of poetry, which is frequently misquoted – as above!

If you want to read the poem from which that is taken – Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – then you don’t have to look very far for a copy in the Library. In fact, we pride ourselves on a quite extensive range of poetry, ancient and modern, ranging from the Greek epic poetry of Homer to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, to the 19th century classics of Coleridge and William Wordsworth, to the contemporary poetry of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion and the recently deceased Seamus Heaney. Not forgetting our comprehensive range of literature databases available on Library Catalogue Plus, most notably Literature Online (LION), from which you can glean everything you ever wanted to know about your favorite poem or poem. Why not have a browse?