10 Interesting Facts About Poetry and Poets

From the Read. archive · updated for 2026

This listicle first ran in Read. in August 2017. We’ve restored it, checked the facts, and added the poetry story the original missed: the one happening right here in the UAE.

The oldest surviving epic is about 4,000 years old. The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia, tells the story of a king who was part god, part man — and it predates most of written literature.
The longest poem runs to roughly 1.8 million words. The Mahabharata, the Sanskrit epic of ancient India, dwarfs every other poem ever composed — it’s many times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined.
Poetry came before writing. Epics were composed to be recited aloud and carried from memory — rhythm and rhyme weren’t decoration, they were the storage format.
A haiku is seventeen syllables. The traditional Japanese form runs three lines of five, seven, and five syllables — and, unlike most short verse, it rarely rhymes.
“Unfriend” is medieval. Centuries before social media, the word appears as a noun — someone who is not a friend — in English texts from the Middle Ages, including the thirteenth-century epic poem Brut.
One book of poetry was bound in a murderer’s skin. A nineteenth-century edition of John Milton’s poetical works was covered using the skin of executed murderer George Cudmore — a documented example of the grim old practice of anthropodermic bookbinding.
World Poetry Day is March 21. UNESCO declared it in 1999 to support linguistic diversity and endangered languages through poetic expression.
The UAE has its own poetic tradition: Nabati. Nabati poetry is the vernacular verse of the Arabian Peninsula — composed in everyday spoken Arabic rather than the classical register, and passed down orally through Bedouin culture for centuries.
The UAE’s founding father was a poet. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan composed Nabati verse, and Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, is a published poet in the same tradition — here, poetry has never been a fringe pursuit.
Abu Dhabi turned Nabati verse into prime-time television. Million’s Poet, the televised competition launched in Abu Dhabi in the 2000s, put Nabati poets on stage before millions of viewers, competing for one of the richest poetry prizes in the world.

Not bad for an art form sometimes written off as a school subject. If the last two facts are news to you, an evening at one of the UAE’s poetry events — in Arabic or English — is the natural next step.