National Poetry Day 2026
The first Thursday in October is the UK’s National Poetry Day, a day dedicated to celebrating poetry in all its forms and giving us all the chance to come together and share in the pleasure of poetry.
As Scotland has such a rich history of poetry, we thought we’d take today to talk a little about poetry in Scotland, National Poetry Day itself, and a little bit about poetry here at Napier!
National Poetry Day has been celebrated in the UK for over thirty years and has seen participation from millions of people taking part in organised events such as discussions and workshops. Celebrations for the day are typically organised by the Forward Arts Foundation, but organisations across the entire UK join in with their own celebrations as well. Past celebrations have involved public readings and discussions hosted by poets, public displays of poetry in prominent locations, and workshops to help aspiring poets hone their craft.
You can find the full list of official events on the Forward Arts Foundation events page. However, you don’t need to join an official event in order to take part – just trying sharing some of your favourite poetry with people you know, or even write some yourself. One of the most beautiful things about poetry is that all you need to get started is a pen and paper!
Poetry in Scotland
Now, here in Scotland we have a long history of poetry stretching back hundreds of years, with epic poems of the medieval era such as Brus by John Barbour, and Blind Harry’s The Wallace, serving as romantic (and heavily fictionalised!) recordings of Scottish history that have done much to shape the popular view of medieval Scottish history. This tradition then continued over the following centuries, with Scottish poetry coming to place an emphasis on capturing Scottish vernacular and being written in either Scottish Gaelic or in the Scots language. From this tradition we have Robert Burns, perhaps Scotland’s most famous poet, who was known for collecting poetry and folk songs from around the country and adapting them to both Scots and English, along with discussing the important topics of his day such as the development of Scottish identity in Britain, issues of social class and the church, and gender.
By the twentieth century, Scotland would see a great revival of Scottish prose and poetry writing dubbed the Scottish Renaissance, with a new wave of writers helping to bring about a renewed interest in poetic works written that are written in Scots language and which tackle Scottish identity in the modern world. Edinburgh served as a major hub of this movement, with many prominent Scots poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid calling the city their home.
The Scottish Poetry Library
As a testament to this, Edinburgh is now how to the Scottish Poetry Library, which can be found just off the Canongate, a short walk from the Royal Mile. The Poetry Library is the heart of poetry in Scotland, with their website holding records of over 3,000 poems that you can read for free anytime you want. They also run several ongoing projects, such as their toolkit for running your own poetry workshop, which we can proudly say is being ran in collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University. Another project from the poetry library, ran in collaboration with Napier and other higher education institutes, was the Poems for Nurses & Midwives pocket book, an anthology of poetry intended to serve as a source of comfort and inspiration for newly qualified nurses and midwives. You can find a copy of the collection in our Sighthill Campus library in the Wellbeing Collection, and it is recommended reading for any of our student nurses who are making the transition to work.
The Poetry Library also works closely with Scotland’s national poet (known as the Makar) to promote poetry nationally. The current Makar of Scotland is Pàdraig MacAoidh, who is also the first Makar to write his work primarily in Gaelic.
Our Library
We here at Edinburgh Napier we are happy to have been the host of the Scottish Revival Network, a group led by academics here at the university dedicated to studying the work of the Scottish literary revival, including looks at Scottish poetry of the era. The network oversaw the publication of academic papers on the subject, as well as a range of different lectures. You can find recordings of many of these lectures on the Network’s Youtube page.
Also at Napier we have the War Poets Collection, dedicated to the memory of the poets of the First World War who were treated at Craiglockhart hydropathic, which is now the building that makes up our Craiglockhart campus. In the collection, you’ll find first edition copies of work by famed poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, collections of prose and other written works relating to Craiglockhart, along with recordings of the poetry recited by legendary Hollywood actor Daniel Day Lewis, author Pat Barker, along with many others.
Of course, you can also check what poetry we have in stock at our campus libraries by checking on LibrarySearch. Your university membership also gives you access to the university’s Literature Online subscription, where you can find a huge variety of poetry and other written works.
By Matthew Ferrie
