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
F
Formal Verse
Poetry that overtly uses the effects of metre, rhyme and form, especially the fixed forms (sonnets, villanelles etc) is known as formal verse. Good examples in the Archive include the extract from Fred D'Aguiar's 'Bloodlines', written in ottava rima, Mimi Khalvati's tight quatrains in 'Don't Ask Me, Love, For That First Love', or Dylan Thomas' 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, Of A Child in London', in which the poet has invented a set of formal restrictions that he adheres to.
Its opposite, strictly, is free verse. Many poets, however, can and do operate in both free and formal ways in their work, and sometimes within the one poem. A classic example of this is T S Eliot's 'The Waste Land', which moves between blank verse and free verse, and shifts in and out of rhyming.
Felix Dennis writes almost entirely in formal verse.