The year that the BBC was founded as the British Broadcasting Company (it was renamed 'Corporation' in 1928) was also a famous year for modern literature. In the words of the poet Ezra Pound, 1922 was 'Year One of a new era', which saw the publication of both Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The new Poet Laureate, John Masefield, prophesied that radio could bring into existence a 'new poetry for the new audience'.

John Masefield dies
At the time of his death, Masefield had lived long enough to hear compelling experiments with dramatisations of long poems, 'radiophonic' sound poems, and the beginnings of performance poetry, all of which have continued on the BBC in various forms to this day.

Poetry also found a place at the heart of public commemorations, from Masefield's ode on George VI's coronation in 1937, to the Armistice Day poems that the BBC commissioned in 2018 to mark a century since the end of the First World War.

Poetry also found a place at the heart of public commemorations, from Masefield's ode on George VI's coronation in 1937, to the Armistice Day poems that the BBC commissioned in 2018 to mark a century since the end of the First World War.

A classic of the ‘Georgian’ style of poetry fashionable in the previous decade, John Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’, first read on the BBC in 1924.

The BBC invites the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, to give its first national lecture in 1929.

Across the Atlantic, Langston Hughes published ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ – a powerful expression of African-American pride that he would read on BBC radio in 1962 as the civil rights movement gathered momentum in the States.

E.E. Cummings, reading ‘next to god of course America i’ (1925), from a satirical sequence on the involvement of the U.S. in the First World War, inspired by his own experiences.

The soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon read on the B.B.C. in 1929, but here he is represented by a recording from the 1950s, reading ‘Everyone Sang’ (1919), his poem about the mass outbreak of joy at the Armistice in 1918.

The BBC began the new decade with a new format for poetry programmes. 'The Living Poet', which ran until the early 1990s, would feature a single poet giving a recital of their poems. In 1960, this was a radical departure from convention: most poems broadcast on the BBC were read by actors, and most programmes were anthologies bringing together poems by many different poets. 'The Living Poet' realised that poets, and poetry audiences, increasingly wanted not just the poet's words, but their voice.

Donald Allen's influential 1960 anthology of poets from the underground and avant-gardes is published, which would inspire a 'New Poetry Revival' in Britain later in the decade.

A figurehead for the New American Poets, known for their fascination with breath and voice, Creeley blends modernist experimentation with the understated patterns of everyday speech.

In Britain, poetic experiment was also inspired by new technology. Sound poets like Bob Cobbing explored the physical matter of the human voice: his ABC in Sound (1965) plays with the alphabet, while dissolving the boundaries of words and creating a new kind of sense. Meanwhile, in her 'radiophonic' work, Rosemary Tonks used all the gadgets available in BBC studios to create a vocal soundscape by turns eerie and joyous.

As the decolonisation of the British Empire gathered pace, poets were transforming the language of the former coloniser to their own artistic ends.

In 1932, the BBC launched its Empire Service (later the Overseas and then the World Service), which gave its radio programming a global reach.

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.

World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers.

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. It was, Graves said, because it was a different kind of war. The army of 1941 was not the ‘amateur, desperate, happy-go-lucky, ragtime lousy army of 1914-18.’

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.

In the 1970s, it discovered a far greater diversity of voices within the UK itself as 'BBC English' began to venture further beyond the rule-bound respectability of Received Pronunciation.

In 1978, the Poetry Society and the BBC launched the National Poetry Competition.

UK poetry had for too long been dominated by male voices, but now poets such as Grace Nichols, Wendy Cope and Selima Hill began to claim more space in lyric verse for female experience.

In 2009, Carol Ann Duffy became the first female poet laureate.

The 1990s was a time of youthful self-confidence in British culture. The early years saw the rise of the Young British Artists, led by Damien Hirst, and the Britpop sound of bands like Blur, Pulp and Elastica. In 1994, a younger generation of UK poets – including Carol Ann Duffy, David Dabydeen and current Poet Laureate Simon Armitage -- were widely promoted across the BBC as a ‘New Generation’, as arts journalists debated whether poetry was ‘the new rock and roll’.

As a new millennium began, the BBC had become a significant force in the UK poetry culture. Not only did it give a platform to poets and introduce them to new audiences; now, it created festivals and residencies, and commissioned new work. The introduction of a new radio programme, The Verb, in April 2002, which continues to be presented by the poet Ian McMillan. Just as The Living Poet reflected the poetry culture of the 1960s, with the single author reciting their work, now The Verb, with its informal 'showcase' or 'word cabaret', placed poetry at the heart of innovations in literature and performance in order to imagine a more expansive idea of the 'poetic'.

BBC 100 Poets is the result of a collaboration between the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, BBC History and the Poetry Archive. It began in 2019 with a successful application for a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the AHRC-funded CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership on 'Poetry Television Broadcasting at the BBC 1932--present'. BBC 100 Poets, however, focuses on the rich archive of modern poets who have read their work on BBC Radio.