The poetry archive describes its mission as follows:
Poetry was an oral art form before it became textual. Homer's work lived through the spoken word long before any markings were made on a page. Hearing a poet reading his or her work remains uniquely illuminating. It helps us to understand the work as well as helping us to enjoy it. 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. What would we not give to be able to hear Keats and Byron reading their work? And, if recording had been possible in the early nineteenth century, how inexplicable it would seem now if no-one had recorded their voices. Yet in the twentieth 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 (as far as we know. Please tell us if you have a recording of Hardy or Housman reading his poetry!), for example - died without having been recorded at all. The Poetry Archive was, therefore, created to make sure that such omissions never happen again and that everyone has a chance to hear major poets reading their work.
There are hundreds of readings in the archive, so it is difficult choose the best Luckily the Guardian had a go on our behalf - Auden, Plath, Bishop, Larkin......
YouTube has a surprising number of interesting clips of famous poets reading stuff:
Basil Bunting reads from Briggflatts Really, Brigflatts is up there with 'The Waste Land' and Pound's 'Cantos' as a great Modernist poem. The fact that even now it is less well known underlies the fact that modernism never really took root in the UK and was, and still is, viewed somewhat sceptically as something faintly dubious and 'foreign'. There is no British equivalent really to Le Corbousier or Boulez - as a culture we are very resistant to the notion of revolutionary change.
Dylan Thomas - Fern Hill To re-inforce the last point - take the case of Dylan Thomas, some of his poetry from the mid 30s is quite revolutionary and, along with George Barker, dallies with surrealism. The material that has stood the test of time- 'Fern Hill' 'Do not go gentle..' is much more conventional. Fern Hill really simply re-iterates a Wordsworthian view of childhood; it's a pretty poem though even so.
Philip Larkin - Whitsum Weddings The critic, Wiiliam Empson, heralded in post-war lit-crit with his book, 'Seven Types of Ambiguity'. Larkin is a master of drawing-out the ambiguous from the mundane and everyday. Is Whitsun Weddings the best poem by a British author in the second half of the 20th century? I cannot think of a better one.
Sylvia Plath - Nine poems Personally I prefer Plath's less famous poems yo her more celebrated - like 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy'. Take 'Mushrooms' for example, read here, beginning at 14:45. Firstly, it's a tour-de-force of how to employ syllabics - and her turn of phrase is annoyingly good, like 'we diet on water and crumbs of shadow'. How marvelous is that?
Wallace Stevens reads Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour It is no surprise that Helen Vendler begins her anthology of twentieth century American poetry with Stevens. The sense that the a poem exists in a universe of its own making seems to anticipate the post modern, decades before the term was coined. Oddly though, his delivery reminds me of Auden somehow.
Galway Kinnell reads Last Gods - A miracle of concentration, like a rich sauce made all the more flavoursome through reduction.
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