But more than 800 knitting enthusiasts are currently involved in knitting and crocheting individual letters to create the world's first giant knitted poem as part of the centenary celebrations for the Poetry Society, with the as-yet secret poem set to be unveiled at the beginning of October. Poetry Society director Judith Palmer said she had been inundated by knitters keen to get involved. "It hasn't been a matter of trying to persuade people to join in – we're just trying to manage the huge number who are calling up all the time," she said. "It's just spread and spread: there must be 90 knitting blogs writing about it around the world."

The level of interest in the project meant, she said, that she had considered doing a longer poem – The Prelude, or Paradise Lost – but she has so far stuck to her original choice, a mystery to all but a few people at the moment but likely to become less of a secret when the letters start to be sewn into words in September. "People are guessing all the time," said Palmer, a keen knitter herself. "They guess Yeats's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven most often, and it is one I thought about doing." Her choice, though, is "not an obvious one", although she did admit that the poem had "a significance in the history of the Poetry Society".