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
Mario Petrucci
B. 1958
Mario Petrucci is a multi-award-winning poet, physicist, translator, educator and broadcaster, active with such outlets as Kaleidoscope, The Verb and the BBC World Service. His work is as profoundly moving as it is thought-provoking, shifting convincingly between lyric, performance, science,…
Latest Collection
Guided Tour
From the glossary
E
Epigram
An epigram is a short, succinct poem, often with witty (or even vicious) content. Coleridge wrote an epigram to define an epigram: "What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, / Its body brevity and wit its soul." It is worth noting that this is a stricter definition than epigrams seem to have had in classical Greece and Rome, where the form originates; it is probably the eighteenth-century fondness for a smart wit and the epigrams of Martial that tightened the definition thus. The preference in contemporary poetry for exploring an issue rather than summing it up means epigrams are not as popular as they were then, but Anne Stevenson's 'On Going Deaf', with its wit, rhyme and definite opinion, is probably the closest example within the Archive.
Samuel Menashe's 'The Living End' manages to fit mysticism into an epigram.