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
Shash Trevett is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies (including POETRY, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ambit and The North), she has read widely across the U.K and internationally and is a…
Latest Collection
Guided Tour
From the glossary
C
Cadence
Cadence is a term borrowed from music, where it refers to the use of a group of notes or chords used to end a piece of music or a phrase within it. As it can also be used to refer to the audible features of speech - a statement slowing and falling in pitch as it ends, for example, or the pause that a comma demands - it has been taken up by poets to refer to the pitch and rhythm of words within a poem. Unlike discussions of metre, which refer to the beat underlying what is said, cadence attends to actual variations.
For example, Ian McMillan's 'For Me', a poem about not having to rhyme, makes three ridiculous arguments that use the same cadences; this achieves the effects of linking the stanzas by sound, without using rhyme. In Michael Longley's 'The Ice-Cream Man', there is a recurring metre ticking away under the whole poem, but a line that contains a narrative sentence, such as "and you bought carnations to lay outside his shop", carries a different cadence from one containing a list, like "Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica". This is one way of keeping a regular metre from becoming dull with repetition, and also has the effect of binding the two list cadences, of flowers and flavours, a little closer in the ear.
Each stanza in Elizabeth Bartlett's 'Painting of a Bedroom with Cats' is a single sentence, each with a semi-colon at the end of the fourth line; this gives each stanza a similar cadence, but Bartlett ensures they are never boringly identical.