Estimated number of unpublished poets in the United Kingdom: 50,000

Number of individuals who entered the U.K.'s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award (annual poetry competition for 11-17 year-olds) in 2009: 6,000

Number of individuals who entered the U.K.'s Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2008: 4,900

Number of poems submitted to Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2009: 14,323

Number of poems submitted to Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2008: 11, 800 (percentage increase 2008-9: 22%)

What was the most important event in the history of poetry publishing, and how recently did it occur? 

Publication of Shakespeare's First Folio; 377 years ago

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Most exalted defence of poetry in the nineteenth century: 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' (Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821)

Least flattering assessment of poetry in the 18^th century: Sir Isaac Newton 

A friend once said to him, 'Sir Isaac, what is your opinion of poetry?' His answer was: 'I'll tell you that of Barrow; he said that poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense.'

REV. JOSEPH SPENCE: From Anecdotes, 1820

The greatest act of vandalism committed by a literary executor against a poet: John Cam Hobhouse's destruction of Lord Byron's Memoirs (1818-21)

Poet whose face in old age most resembled a mature walnut: W.H. Auden

Age of W.B. Yeats when he published his first and last collections of poetry: 24 and 73

Number of copies sold of first edition of Wallace Stevens' first book, Harmonium: 26

Most theatrically incomprehensible poet in performance (English or Russian): Joseph Brodsky

Most genial and avuncular poet in performance: Seamus Heaney

Most unusual punishment meted out to a poet for killing a man in a duel: Ben Jonson - branding on left thumb

Poet who persistently affected a cloak: Alfred Lord Tennyson

Poet with the greatest penchant for tricorne hats: Marianne Moore

Most celebrated gat-toothed poets living today: Benjamin Zephaniah and John Ashbery

Great poets most besotted by minors (no evidence of wrong-doing): Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch

Most robust poet with a reputation for effeteness: John Keats

Most unusual cause of poet's death during reign of Elizabeth I: Robert Greene's, as a result of a surfeit of Rheinish wine and pickled herrings

Most extraordinarily generous advance against sales offered by a publisher to a poet during the early 19^th century: £3,000, by John Murray, to George Crabbe for Tales of the Hall (1817-19)

Poet whose physical presence is most vividly evoked by his early biographers: Geoffrey Chaucer, who was said to be 'inclined to corpulence,' 'no poppet to embrace,' of fair complexion with 'a beard the colour of ripe wheat', of 'elvish' expression, and with an eye downcast and meditative.

Poet with the largest and most extravagantly various array of literary identities: Fernando Pessoa, who had seventy-two heteronyms.

Sum offered to - and rejected by - Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate of England, to undertake reading tour of America in 1862: £20,000

Number of copies of broadsheet containing Tennyson's 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington' sold to the crowds in the streets of London on 14 September, 1852, the day of Wellington's funeral service at St Paul's Cathedral: 10,000

What are poets for? John Agard, first writer in residence at the South Bank Poetry Library, said that their current role was to 'deal with epiphanies' in language honed, polished and compressed until words read - and sounded - like 'the splendours of speech newly found'.