Filter results
As well as new recordings by contemporary poets the Poetry Archive also contains selections of classic poems recorded by contemporary voices.
327 results
Poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley
B. 1792 D. 1822
Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, MP for the Duke of Norfolk’s pocket borough of Shoreham-by-sea. Shelley was educated at Eton, where he was known as ‘Mad Shelley’, and University College…
Poet
Edward Thomas
B. 1878 D. 1917
Edward Thomas wrote all his poetry in less than three years, between 1914, when he wrote his first, and 1917, when he was killed in the Battle of Arras. Most of his poems were published posthumously; they show sensitive observation…
Poet
John Keats
B. 1795 D. 1821
Keats was born in London in 1795. His father was killed in a riding accident when Keats was eight; his mother died six years later, probably from tuberculosis. The loss of his parents, especially of his mother, was to help…
Poet
Christina Rossetti
B. 1830 D. 1894
Many readers first come across Christina Rossetti as the writer of the words of the carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, or the deceptively simple, but actually strange and powerful, fairy tale in verse, Goblin Market. But her work ranges widely,…
Poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
B. 1806 D. 1861
Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806, the eldest of twelve children of Edward Barrett, whose fortune was derived from Jamaican plantations. She was largely self-educated at home: something of a prodigy, she read novels aged six and Pope’s translations of…
Poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
B. 1772 D. 1874
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the tenth and youngest child of the schoolmaster of the country town of Ottery St Mary. After the death of his father he attended Christ’s Hospital School: ‘I was reared / In the…
Poet
Robert Browning
B. 1812 D. 1889
Robert Browning was born in South London in 1812. He was largely self-educated, utilising his father’s extensive library of over six thousand volumes. A voracious reader, Browning would later draw on his wide and sometimes arcane learning in his poetry,…
Poet
John Milton
B. 1608 D. 1674
John Milton was born in 1608 in Bread Street, Cheapside, the son of a composer and scrivener. He was educated at St Paul’s School and Christ’s College, Cambridge and seemed destined for the priesthood. However, at Cambridge he began to…
Poet
Wilfred Owen
B. 1893 D. 1918
The poems that made Wilfred Owen famous were mostly published after his death in action a week before the end of the First World War. Powerfully influenced by Keats and Shelley, he experimented with verse from childhood, but found his…
Poet
William Wordsworth
B. 1770 D. 1850
Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumbria, in 1770, the son of an attorney. Both parents were dead by the time he was thirteen, a loss recorded in the early part of ‘The Prelude’ where he describes with vivid intensity his…
Poet
Thomas Wyatt
B. 1503 D. 1542
Thomas Wyatt was born in 1504. His father was a Lancastrian, imprisoned and tortured near the end of the Wars of the Roses in the reign of Richard III, then promoted to high office by Henry VII. Thomas entered the…
Poet
William Blake
B. 1757 D. 1827
William Blake was born in London in 1757 and spent most of his long life there. The son of a hosier, he left ordinary school at the age of ten to join a drawing school, and at fourteen became apprenticed…
Poet
Emily Dickinson
B. 1830 D. 1886
Only seven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime; these were heavily edited. Many of the rest were found after her death, in little packets bound together to make small books. They were regarded at first as odd,…
Poet
John Donne
B. 1572 D. 1631
John Donne was the greatest non-dramatic poet of his time, and its most admired preacher. He was born in 1571, a Londoner and the son of Catholic parents. In his teens, he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, and in his…
Poet
Emily Bronte
B. 1818 D. 1848
Emily Bronte was born in 1818, the daughter of Irishman Patrick Bronte, perpetual curate of Haworth, Yorkshire. Emily’s mother died in 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of their aunt. Four of the daughters were sent…
Poet
Lord Byron
B. 1788 D. 1824
George Byron was born in 1788 with a deformed foot: he limped all his life. His father was ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, an infamous adventurer who abandoned his wife and family in 1790 and died in 1791. At the age of…
Poet
Thomas Hardy
B. 1840 D. 1928
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, the son of a stonemason. He trained and practised as an architect, but, as soon as he could, earned his living by writing the novels which made him famous. Then, after Jude the Obscure…
Poet
John Clare
B. 1793 D. 1864
John Clare, the son of a casual labourer, was born in Helpstone, Northamptonshire. His twin sister died a few weeks after their birth and he was brought up in poverty, only attending school very occasionally because his father couldn’t keep…