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
Guided Tour
From the glossary
L
Limerick
A limerick is a five-line poem, almost always humorous, and frequently rude. Its rhyme scheme is aabba, with the first, second and last lines having three stresses and the third and fourth lines having two. Edward Lear, a frequent writer of limericks, often had his first and last lines identical, or nearly so, making it a circular form; contemporary limericks seem to prefer to let the poem continue, as Michael Rosen's '3 Limericks' show.
Limericks do not, as a rule, lend themselves to serious poems.