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
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
E
Epigraph
An epigraph is a brief bit of text, usually borrowed from another writer, found before a poem, but after the title. (You may also find one at the start of a book, before the poems, but after the title page.) It gives a reader, or listener, something else to hold in mind as the poem is read. Neither part of the poem, nor wholly separate from it, an epigraph can be used for various purposes; it can be necessary information to understand a poem, for example, or it can be something with which the poem disagrees.
It is predominantly found in written form, but in a reading, the poet may expand upon the epigraph, as Adrian Mitchell does in 'Life is a Walk Across A Field'; the proverb with which the title disagrees is an epigraph in the published poem, but here Mitchell explains that instead.
How to use this term
Ian McMillan's 'The Texas Swing Boys Dadaist Manifesto' has an invented quotation as its epigraph, which - like the title - aims to create a mood of collision between country music and surrealist collage that the poem can work in.