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
E
Enjambment
Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break. If a poet allows all the sentences of a poem to end in the same place as regular line-breaks, a kind of deadening can happen in the ear, and in the brain too, as all the thoughts can end up being the same length. Enjambment is one way of creating audible interest; others include caesura, or having variable line-lengths.
Mimi Khalvati's 'Don't Ask Me, Love, For That First Love' shows enjambment in its various strengths; the second line, ending at the same time as the sentence, is completely end-stopped, but "What had summer / to do with sorrow in full spate?" is fluidly enjambed. However, the pause for the comma at the end of the fifth line means that the enjambment is less pronounced here. The poet's skill with enjambment is one of the ways in which she keeps her short-lined stanzas, rhymed abab, from jangling unsophisticatedly.
In Vicki Feaver's 'Marigolds', the lines about "the flowers men give women" are primarily end-stopped, whereas the more exciting flowers appear in lines that use enjambment strongly.