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.
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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
From the glossary
B
Blank verse
Blank verse is a form based on unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The verse parts of Shakespeare's plays are blank verse (with exceptions, such as the witches' recipe), as is Milton's Paradise Lost. The form is one that is close to normal speech (indeed, "the form is one that's close to normal speech" is itself an iambic pentameter) so it gives a subtle pulse to a poem, rather than an obvious shaping as a limerick might. However, there is a tendency in contemporary poetry to use shorter lines, so the form can also sound stately or slow to a modern ear.
'The Waste Land' uses this effect, so that the difference between the lines "I read, much of the night, and go south in winter" and "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?" are very much audible, the strict blank verse of the second section sounding instantly more oratorical than the looser metre of the earlier, more human, line. On the other hand, David Gascoyne's 'Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siecle' begins in blank verse and, as the poem turns to what exceeds the powers of poetry, the line length exceeds blank verse, stretching to hexameter, or even heptameter.
It is interesting to wonder if important pieces of blank verse such as in Shakespeare's plays, Paradise Lost and The Prelude are in blank verse because it sounds natural, or if they influenced speech so much that they made blank verse sound natural.
Michael Hamburger's 'Ave Atque Vale', which looks at permanence and change, has a base of blank verse but makes variations to it.