Among the many e-mails we receive at The Poetry Archive, there is occasionally one demanding to know why Wordsworth, Keats or Shakespeare are not included. How can we have overlooked such towering literary figures?
Since our e-mail correspondence is largely anonymous, it’s impossible for us to know what lies behind this entertaining question. But, in its own way, it gets right to the heart of what The Poetry Archive is and why it matters.
Recording technology is, of course, relatively young, although people are often surprised to find that we have a fragment of Robert Browning’s voice dating from 1889. This predates, by one year, the more famous recording of Tennyson reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade‘, and it’s a treasure made all the more unusual by its context: it was recorded at a dinner party, to which one of the guests has brought a phonograph. Browning is initially reluctant, but eventually relents and can be heard reciting from his poem ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix‘. Unfortunately, he forgets the words after a few lines, tries again and then gives up, but can be heard expressing his astonishment at this ‘wonderful invention‘. Listening to this fragment is rather like looking at a 19th-century photograph: it’s a powerful reminder that ‘they‘ were like ‘us‘: they went to parties, got excited about new technology and forgot their lines every now and then.
The historic dimension to The Poetry Archive is crucial, as it’s here that all these treasures of the past are collected together, set in context and made available to everyone who wants to hear them. Equally important is the Archive’s role in capturing the voices of living poets. When a poet dies without making a recording, a precious resource is lost for ever, and, as time goes by, that loss is felt more and more keenly. Our e-mail correspondent is not alone in wishing to hear Keats and Byron reading their work. If only recording had been possible in the early 19th century! Yet, even in the 20th century, when recording technology became universal, there was no systematic attempt to record all significant poets for posterity, and even some major poets – Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman, for example – died without having been recorded at all. A major part of The Poetry Archive’s mission is to make sure that this never happens again. A continuous programme of recording significant contemporary poets means that the Archive goes on growing and developing, extending its range to include work in all styles and from every part of the English-speaking world. We are currently working in partnership with the Poetry Foundation in Chicago to add 100 American poets to the Archive, and we are discussing similar collaborative projects with organisations in other countries. The Archive has made a strong start, but there is much more to do.
Why poets reading their work? Why not get actors to do it? Some actors read poems very effectively, and poets sometimes read other poets’ work with intelligence and sympathy. But The Poetry Archive is driven by a passionate conviction that hearing a poet reading their work is a uniquely illuminating experience. It helps us to understand the work as well as helping us to enjoy it. Writers have a particular right to their own work, and we are taken to a deeper level of understanding by hearing how they speak it. To students of poetry and to all lovers of literature, such a reading is a powerful source of insight and enjoyment.
Real, concentrated listening is a creative as well as an interpretative experience. Poetry began as a spoken art form, long before most people could read or write, and its internal music was vital. It was how a poem was memorised, and it was the thing that gave it colour and life. In the age of near-universal literacy, this aural dimension has lost some of its status, so that many people encounter poetry exclusively on the page. As Andrew Motion puts it: ‘When Frost said “the ear is the best reader“, he didn’t mean to say that he preferred the fleeting voice to the substantial page, but to give them both equal value, and to remind us how they depended on one another.‘ Seamus Heaney has spoken of that same equal valuing, of the twin pleasures of ‘reading out‘ and ‘reading into yourself‘. The two do not compete but complement one another. Live readings have always provided marvellous opportunities to hear the voices of poets, but to listen to a poem whenever you like, as many times as you like, and to explore voices of the past as well as the present: this is a new pleasure, made possible by the Internet. There is something particularly satisfying in using the power of our defining contemporary technology to revive the aural tradition and restore to us the imaginative joys of listening.
The Poetry Archive is accessible to all, completely free of charge. At the last count, there were 175 poets to listen to, including Simon Armitage, Margaret Atwood, Sujata Bhatt, e e cummings, T S Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Edwin Morgan, Les Murray, Don Paterson, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Derek Walcott and W B Yeats … to name but a few. Tours and trails lead from one poet’s work to another, making it a great place for independent study and research. The website is also home to a wealth of supporting material, including biographical information, filmed interviews with poets and browsers which you can use to search by theme and by poetic form. In 2008, we added a unique glossary of ‘poetry vocabulary’; it contains definitions of useful terms (like ambiguity, metaphor and stanza), sound files which demonstrate the way the words are pronounced and links to real-life examples in poems.
We welcome comments and suggestions, so please visit www.poetryarchive.org and send us an e-mail telling us what you think. We are especially keen to go on developing new resources which are genuinely useful to students. But the Archive is fundamentally about the listening experience, which is truly educational in itself. Our mission is to encourage people to listen more widely, more adventurously and with greater enjoyment. As the Guardian put it, ‘Every day is improved by going to The Poetry Archive‘.
