TOMORROW is National Poetry Day. It was launched in 1994, and though the calendar since then has become overburdened with national days, ranging from the sombre (Holocaust Memorial Day, Jan 27) to the perhaps joyous (National Wrong Trousers Day, June 24), via the frankly infantile (National Doodle Day, March 2), it remains one of the best.

Few special days could be more appropriate. For of all the arts, poetry is the one at which our nation excels the most. Indeed, led of course by Bill Shakespeare, it is the only one in which we might fairly be judged internationally supreme. The run-up to this year’s poetry day has brought a couple of exceptional spotlights. Most eye-catching is arguably the closest-possible focus on our favourite poems. Poetry enthusiast Gary Dexter took the bold, not to say risky, step of buttonholing members of the public, in pubs, at bus stops, out shopping, and asking them if they had a favourite poem. He’d learned about 30 that he thought might crop up often, and if one was chosen he would offer to recite it. If a poem was chosen that he knew of but couldn’t recite he aimed to offer something similar.

Did I suggest risky? He sometimes received the crudest of send-offs. But the police were never called. Happily enough people co-operated for him to produce a book, published tomorrow, which presents, as its title says, The People’s Favourite Poems (Old Street £12.99).

Matching an online vote some years ago, Rudyard Kipling’s If comes top. The popularity of poetry at funerals probably accounts for the high-up presence of Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle… (six), Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death (17), and Christina Rossetti’s Remember (21). Old favourites like John Masefield’s Cargoes (27) and newer ones such as W. H. Auden’s Funeral Blues (Stop all the Clocks, nine) also appear. If not all household names, most of the 30 poets who composed the top 30 poems (just one each) will be known to most poetry lovers.

But a name new to me, a keen poetry reader, is Charles Bukowski. A German-born American poet, his poem Bluebird is the 18th most popular. The bluebird is a happy spirit imprisoned in the poet, whose lifestyle, to his own regret, prevents it getting out. “I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke.” The poem adds: “I only let him out at night sometimes, when everybody’s asleep…” This provides a link with a boost for Poetry Day by the Duchess of Cornwall, who has described her habit of silently recalling poetry in bed. “When you’re under no pressure it comes back more easily. You’re in a half-trance anyway.”

Coupled with the Duchess’s radio interview, medical evidence was produced – from Cambridge University no less – that recalling a poem, or learning a new one is an excellent defence against dementia. Well, for years I’ve often silently recited amid the bedclothes Walter de la Mare’s Silver, a short poem with lovely images of moonlight. More recently I’ve challenged myself to recite Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. When I struggle I have to start again. And while that particular poetic journey is always a pleasure, I can’t say it speeds up finding sleep.