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
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this digital poetry collection invites listeners to explore the poetry of the 1920s. Featuring poems from around the time Fitzgerald was writing Gatsby, and…
From the glossary
C
Couplets
A couplet is a stanza (or even a poem) consisting of two lines. These need not rhyme, nor be the same length, but can be. If there is no enjambment at the end of the second line, it can be called a closed couplet (the opposite being an open couplet), especially if this is a recurring pattern. A closed rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter, especially one which forms a unit of sense, is called a heroic couplet; many of these can be found in Pope's 'Essay on Man'. It is also possible to find a longer poem whose lines are rhymed in pairs - aabbcc etc - described as being in rhyming couplets, even if the stanzas are longer than two lines.
Elaine Feinstein's 'Urban Lyric' has an individual aspect of the scene in each couplet, each of which is linked, however, to the adjacent aspects.