Poetry Archive

The Poetry Archive was founded by recording producer Richard Carrington and poet Andrew Motion, during his appointment as UK Poet Laureate in 1999 and is now led by Director Tracey Guiry. Recordings of contemporary work began in 2000 and the first website went live in 2005. The Poetry Archive is a not-for-profit registered UK charity.

Formation and development

The archive was established as a web-based library to ensure that the oral record of modern poets is not lost, as it has been with writers such as Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and A. E. Housman whose voices were never recorded, despite the technology being available at the time. The resource is built on the idea that poets have a unique relationship with their own work and are often able to communicate the nuance, musicality and subtlety of it, with a deeper understanding than actors. Texts to the poems and other resources are available but the poet's voice is the main concern of the site. Motion has stated "To hear the speed at which a poet reads, to hear their accent, to hear how they inflect their voice, to hear how they create a space around their words - or don't - all add to our using of what the meaning of poem might be." Contemporary studio recordings for the project began in 2000, shortly after Motion was appointed a Poet Laureate, and the site went live in 2005. Most of the recordings are created especially for the Archive and these are augmented by some classic poems read by well-known readers. New recordings are regularly added and there is also a download store which allows people to purchase and download audio poetry directly from the website.

In the first year, the site had 500,000 visitors, building to over 1.5 million annual users in 2008, nearly 2 million in 2009 and over 3 million in its 20th year of recording. The project continues to be funded by the National Lottery, government grants and private donors.

The current president is Sir Daniel Day-Lewis. The previous president was the late poet Seamus Heaney