You can explore the Archive in many different ways. You can look for poets you know, you can let us take you to poets whose work you may not know, you can chose poems on a particular theme, or you can ask our guides to show you the recordings they especially like. As the Archive grows, more guides will be added to the Archive. Some guides will be poets and some will be prominent people from other walks of life. All are poetry lovers who are keen to share with you the recordings they especially enjoy.

To come back to your guide when you've listened to a selection, use your BACK button.

As a secondary schoolteacher in London for the past thirty years, it has been my privilege to have had a job which at its core, involves getting teenagers to fall in love with poetry. I have made my selection for this tour from my working perspective. As a consequence one frustration of writing the guide is not being able to call up the voices of earlier poets. I want us to stop and listen to the inspired love in Keats' voice as he reads Bright Star and then to move on to hear Shakespeare's tone as he warns us in Sonnet 129 of the perils of lust. A profound consolation that the existence of this site offers me is that no such limit will be placed upon access to poets' voices in the future.