Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
Welcome to
The Poetry Archive
With over 2000 free poems, 500 poets’ work and 5 million visitors a year, the Poetry Archive represents a rich diversity of both poets and poetry.
What’s new
What is the Poetry Archive?
The Poetry Archive is the only charity wholly dedicated to the production, acquisition and preservation of recordings of significant poets reading their work aloud.
We care for and preserve these uniquely valuable voices, which might otherwise be lost, so that future generations can continue to enjoy them. We make our own recordings of poets who write in the English language, and poets also donate copies of their own archives to us so we can look after them in the long term. Hearing how a poet speaks their own poems brings us a deeper level of understanding and enjoyment of the work and provides a rich resource for poetry lovers, explorers, teachers and students of all ages. We have a fundamental belief that poetry is for everyone so, as a charity, the funds we raise are used to record new poets and keep sharing these wonderful collections free-of-charge with you.
Latest Poet
Poet
Paul Groves
B. 1947
Paul Groves is a poet, critic and Creative Writing Lecturer, a staple of British literary periodicals over a five-decade career. He has won many accolades, including an Eric Gregory Award (1976) and The Times Literary Supplement prize twice (1986, 2007), and has…
Latest Collection
Collection
We were very sad to hear of the passing of the great Fleur Adcock and want to celebrate her life and wonderful poems. We are very proud to have her recordings on the Archive and to be able to preserve them…
From the glossary
S
Synecdoche
Synecdoche is the use of a deliberate confusion of scale, in which a poet refers to one thing in terms of a part of it - or in terms of what it is a part of. So a person could be "a sympathetic ear", or the person who was actually speaking when the news reports that "the government said today...". The person is neither just an ear nor the whole government, but using synecdoche to suggest that s/he is heightens that role.
The mysterious arsonist in 'Incident on a Holiday', by Alan Brownjohn, is just "unpoliced fingers", a synecdoche that maintains the mystery with this extreme close-up.