Listen to Poetry

We hope to encourage children and adults to listen to poetry. Listening adds a different dimension to a person’s experience of a poem. Our deeper roots in human culture all stem from aural communication and story telling.  In this modern age listening to poetry is less common than reading it.

Creative people, great poets amongst them, live close to the edge and tap into the depths of human experience. Poets then express and transform that experience into the words, rhythm and rhyme of poetry. In our busy lives there are few opportunities to read poetry out loud but the current coronavirus lockdown has provided one for me! We hope that people might enjoy listening to these poems.

There are poems for children of all ages here. Children greatly benefit from learning poems off-by-heart. This process of learning a poem is helpful in developing a young person’s imagination. Children learn that words spoken with clarity, imagination and above all feeling, have more meaning and power. Children love to repeat things (as we all do) but a child will listen to a poem or story again and again. When this natural interest in poetry is nurtured and encouraged children can develop a creative relationship to words and meaning.

This site can also act as a kind of online anthology of poetry. We seldom sit down with the ‘complete works’ of a poet, but are more likely to dip into an anthology.  Though we mostly have out of copyright poems we now have pages for Contemporary Poets and Translators. 

We have included all the out of copyright poems in the AQA, OCR and Pearson Edexcel English GCSE exam syllabi. AQA, AS and A-Level English Literature ‘Love Poetry Through the Ages’ poems are also included. We hope it will be helpful for young people taking these exams to be able to listen to the poems.