Poetry Archive Now! was established in 2020 to enable us to gather recordings from a much wider pool of talented poets from the UK and around the world. It is now firmly established as a premier ...

How we did it The BBC 100 Collection is the result of a collaboration between the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, BBC History and the Poetry ...

A New Millennium 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 ...

The New Rock and Roll 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 ...

The National Poetry Competition In 1978, the Poetry Society and the BBC launched the National Poetry Competition. Several of the poets featured in this section were winners in the years that ...

A Diversity of Voices In the 1960s the BBC’s poetry programming opened itself up to the world. In the following decade, it discovered a far greater diversity of voices within the UK itself ...

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 ...

A Different Kind of War 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 ...

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 ...

A Departure from Convention 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 ...