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
Competition
The Wordview 2025 collection showcases our winning 2025 poets and their work that captures this extraordinary year for future reflection.
From the glossary
I
Iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter is the name given to a line of verse that consists of five iambs (an iamb being one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed, such as "before"). It has been a fundamental building block of poetry in English, used in many poems by many poets from the English Renaissance to the present day.
As with any metre, it is not necessary that every line should be entirely slavish in following the rhythm; in fact, being so could make the poem sound dull. Swapping, dropping or adding stressed and unstressed syllables will lend variety to a line without changing the underlying rhythm.
Poems in iambic pentameter may or may not rhyme. Those that are written in continuous lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are said to be in blank verse, while rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter may be called "heroic couplets", particularly when each couplet closes a thought or sentence on its second line.
Iambic pentameter is versatile enough to be used for the 'Ruins of a Great House' in Derek Walcott's poem, and for the terraces that are left behind by the family that Douglas Dunn describes in 'A Removal from Terry Street'.