What is Dead Poets Remembrance Day?

The first national Dead Poets Remembrance Day was celebrated on October 7^th and that weekend in various locations across the country. This new literary holiday is an annual celebration that seeks to remember and honor our nation's past poets through community readings of their works and remembrances of their lives.

The holiday, a project of the Dead Poets Society of America, in cooperation with 20 current and former State Poets Laureate, is a unique way to enrich our cultural commons by annually “digging up” the treasures of our poetic past and resurrecting them in the public imagination. The idea for Dead Poets Remembrance Day developed as mixture El Dia Des Los Muertos (Day of the Day), All Souls Day, and how various communities continue to celebrete their dead poets (see list below).

While initiated by the Dead Poets Society of America, Dead Poets Remembrance Day will be whatever YOU make it to be, as local communities come up with their own creative ways to commemorate their past bards. The official date of the holiday is October 7^th –  the day that Edgar Allan Poe died, and the day that James Whitcomb Riley was born – however, since that often falls on a weekday, celebrations may be held the closest weekend to October 7.^th

Dead Poets Currently Remembered Annually

Every September the Emily Dickinson House and Museum holds a day-long poetry marathon, where the public comes and reads all 1,789 of her poems, with some of the readings held around the Dickinson family plot;

Every June poets come to the unique granite lectern erected on Nick Virgillio’s grave in Camden, New Jersey to remember America’s greatest writer of Haiku;

Every fall in Boston, on the Sunday nearest the birthday of both Anne Sexton and Edwin Estlin Cummings, groups of their fans gather at the chapel at Forest Hill Cemetery for readings and special music, and then walk together to the grave of the poet;

Residents of Branford Connecticut gather every Labor Day to remember the spirit of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose ashes are in a huge boulder by the bay where she used to live;

For 20 years the town of Lewiston, Illinois has held a poetry contest, and on Edgar Lee Masters Day they visit Oak Hill cemetery to read from his famous “Spoon River Anthology”

All over Oregon, William Stafford is celebrated every January 17^th,

Every year exhuberant fans of the Washington, DC-born poet, Jim Morrison, gather to party in the famous Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Morrison’s tomb has become an altar for his fans.

Every November the good folks in Springfield, Illinois, gather at the house of Vachel Lindsay and remember his life and poetry.

Celebrate Dead Poets Remembrance Day

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