Poetry in the UNESCO Courier

Adonis, Ai Qing, Breyten Breytenbach, Ernesto Cardenal, Jayne Cortez, Jean-Pierre Faye, Allen Ginsberg, Sony Labou Tan'si, Thiago de Mello, Amrita Pritam, Kazuko Shiraishi, Andrei Voznesenski... They all responded "present",  in 1982, to UNESCO’s appeal to declare together "War on War", and "to set the ethic of philosophy against military aggression, whatever its source and whatever its pretext." The UNESCO Courier echoed their voices.

Over the years, the Courier has hosted or dedicated its pages to many other poets: Taras Shevchenko, Rabindranath Tagore, Aimé Césaire, Ilya Chavchavadze, César Vallejo, Fernando Pessoa, Anna Akhmatova, Charles Malamoud, Edouard J. Maunick, Izet Sarajlić, Yehuda Amichaï...

The magazine also focused on many poetic traditions throughout the world: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Haiku, Mahavamsa, The Song of the Nibelungs... as well as on the greatest voices of the universal poetic tradition: Dante, Nasimi, Sadriddin Ayn..

To celebrate the World Poetry Day (21 March), we invite our readers to discover more than 100 articles on the world poetry, published over the last seventy years.

Modern poetry

Issues:

• Unesco collection of representative works: treasures of world literature (1986)
• War on war; poets of the world at Unesco (1982)

Articles:

• When poetry is louder than a bomb (2011)
• Universal thought: Tagore, Neruda, Césaire; poetry in the service of a new humanism (2011)
• Interview with Izet Sarajlić by Jasmina Šopova (1998)
• The liberatin power of word, an interview with Aimé Césaire, by Annick Thebia Melsan
• Poetry, an education in freedom (1996)
• Yehudah Amichai talks to Edgar Reichmann (1994)
• Edouard J. Maunick talks to Jasmina Šopova (1994)
• Rimbaud's quest (1993)
• Interview: Charles Malamoud (1993)
• Anna Akhmatova: 'mother courage' of poetry (1990)
• Fernando Pessoa and the spirit of discovery (1989)
• Poetry, freedom and revolution (1989)
• César Vallejo; a revolutionary voice in modern poetry (1988)
• The Poetry of Ilya Chavchavadze (1987)
• The Concrete poetry movement (1986)
• Aimé Césaire : Calendrier lagunaire (1981)
• Ageless voices of poets & writers (1971)
• Rabindranath Tagore; a universal voice (1961)
• Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's poet of freedom (1961)