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
Special Collection
From the glossary
A
Assonance
Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in words that are close to each other - this also includes diphthongs. Like alliteration, it is the sound rather than the letter used that is important.
When the speaker of John Betjeman's 'A Subaltern's Love Song' says "westering, questioning settles the sun / On your low-leaded window", the line is bound up with assonance on the e sound; like the strong alliteration and rhyme throughout, this adds to the jaunty music of the poem. More subtle is Adrienne Rich's use of the technique in the opening of 'For This', where the vowel sounds of "stir the nerves" are woven together with those of "letters from the dead" and "skeletons and petals".
Charles Tomlinson's poem, 'A Rose for Janet', opens with a sustained display of assonance.