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.
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From the glossary
B
Bathos
Bathos is the name given to the feeling that the tone or language being used is far more elevated than is appropriate. Unintentional bathos can utterly scupper a poem, as that sense of distance and disconnectedness is funny, but that humour can be used intentionally, often to humorous or satiric effect. The speaker in Ian Duhig's 'According to Dineen', for example, reaches for the images of high romance, such as the moon, but each time finds a bathetic image, like the half-boiled potato, that brings the poem down to earth. The love may not be in doubt, but trying to express it "properly, according to Dineen" is shown to be in vain.
Kit Wright is either a big fan of power stations, or his 'Ode to Didcot Power Station' is using bathos.