Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
BBC 100 Collection
Celebrating 100 years of poetry on the BBC
The BBC has long been a champion of poetry, and over the last 100 years has had a major influence in both its creative evolution and its national and global promotion. For the BBC’s centenary in 2022, we have created this collection marking key moments in the story of poetry at the BBC. You can discover key milestones in poetry broadcasting across ten changing decades via our interactive timeline, as well as listening to specially selected poems from the BBC’s own historic archive.
The BBC collection is organised by decades starting from 1920 leading us up to the present. It has a plethora of poets as well as insightful expert commentary for each decade provided by our academic partner on this project, the University of East Anglia (UEA).
The additional commentary includes archive footage of video content from the BBC, links to external resources and long-form articles written in our blog pages.
This website collection marks a special partnership between Poetry Archive, BBC and UEA, creating a unique resource of poetic voice, broadcast history and in-depth scholarship.
"Broadcasting is a development with which the future must reckon and reckon seriously".
- BBC’s first Director-General John Reith
When it began in 1922 few listeners can have foreseen how broadcast media would come to dominate our lives over the next hundred years.
- 1930s -
A World Torn Apart
Modern Poetry and the Pylon Poets
In 1936 W.B. Yeats was invited by the BBC to give its 18th National Lecture, on the subject of ‘Modern Poetry’. During the broadcast he confessed that he disliked T.S. Eliot’s verse, but had ‘to admit its satiric intensity’, and acknowledge its influence on a new generation. These younger writers, such as W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Cecil Day Lewis, were sometimes known as the ‘Pylon Poets’ for the way the newly electrified landscape of Britain loomed in their verse. Yeats preferred other voices and styles, notably Eliot’s contemporary Edith Sitwell, whom he found ‘obscure, exasperating, delightful’.
Still falls the Rain -
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss -
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross
- Edith Sitwell's 'Still Falls the Rain'
Sitwell's poem 'Still Falls the Rain' was written in response to the London Blitz in 1941. Most of the poems here reflect the experience of living through this dark decade.
The war renewed debate about poetry in public life. In 1941, the weekly BBC magazine The Listener asked Robert Graves (‘as a war poet’) to explain why the war had produced little great poetry so far. Because, Graves said, it was a different kind of war.
- 1950s -
The Golden Age of Radio
The New School
In 1950, the British literary magazine Nine asked its readers whether ‘the BBC and the literary periodicals are carrying out their responsibilities to poetry’. The readers replied that the BBC ‘should encourage more new poets’. The idea of the ‘new’ was a constant theme of the decade. Britain emerged from the war years with a desire for national renewal, expressed by the Festival of Britain in 1951, with its celebration of contemporary art, design and science.
