Having enjoyed the oral traditions of a Catholic upbringing in Ireland, the novelist Josephine Hart was struck by this gap in English culture. At her Mullingar convent school she had developed “a visceral reaction to the sound of language”. By the age of 12, she could recite chunks of Shakespeare and Yeats, and the nuns even introduced her to Eliot and Auden. As a result, she began to develop what she calls “her inner ear”.

This has stood her in good stead as the bestselling author of Damage and other novels. It is poetry that she liltingly describes as the highest form of expression — above prose and plays. “It has shaped not only how I write, but how I see life and experience. Through that inner ear you hear people in a deeper way. You have access then to what is a primitive gift. Eliot called it the auditory imagination.”

For some time, she has been sharing that gift in her adopted England by promoting poetry readings by leading actors. Over the last year, the monthly Josephine Hart Poetry Hour has become a top ticket at London’s British Library. A youthful audience listens rapturously as Ralph Fiennes brings resonance and meaning to Auden, or Roger Moore to Kipling.

A week tomorrow, Hart transfers this inspirational event to the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Charlotte Rampling is travelling specially from Paris, and Dominic West flies in that morning from Los Angeles to join Claire Bloom and Harriet Walter in declaiming Milton, Tennyson and others in a programme of poetry about the garden.

Part of Hart’s success is due to her high standards — both in material (she is not afraid to speak of the “canon”) and in performers (who give their services free, with profits going to the Actors Centre).

Does anything not work? Hart admits lyrical poetry has proved difficult — notably Byron’s love poems, though “Don Juan aches to be done out loud”. She was wary of Browning’s Andrea del Sarto — about the Italian painter worried that his uxoriousness has prevented him producing his masterpiece. “But Robert Hardy did this extraordinary monologue. It is a poem of unbelievable sexual obsession. People were stunned.”

An essential part of each programme is Hart’s witty, informed introduction, which sets each poet in context and emphasises her passion for the medium. “It sticks in the craw for me as an Irish woman to say so, but there have been more great poets in England than anywhere else in the world.” She has been astounded to find how little they are properly read. “So once a month I try to make it part of the cultural life of London that there should be a reading of great poetry.”

Of course, modern poets, such as Seamus Heaney, give readings all the time. But, as the thriving poetry-slam culture demonstrates, there are many approaches to poetry in performance. Like Dylan Thomas, its practitioners tend to become performers rather than poets.

For this reason, some purists argue against public readings altogether. For them the private act of engaging a poem on a page is paramount. You can linger over phrases and get a sense of the poem’s overall shape. Concrete poets have made a virtue of this, experimenting with the visual presentation of poetry through typography and collage.

For the poet Basil Bunting, on the other hand, “Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life.” He blamed silent reading for the public’s “distrust” of poetry. They had learnt to look for meaning rather than respond to the beauty of what they heard. “Poetry, like music,” he wrote, “is to be heard. It deals in sound.”

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival offers additional means of developing Eliot’s auditory imagination. The best live poetry can be heard at the Hammer and Tongue Slam. Simon Armitage and Nick Laird, two of the brightest talents on the British poetry scene, will be reading their poems. Daisy Goodwin will be introducing her new “treasury” of Poems to Last a Lifetime. She has recently drawn flak in the London Review of Books for dumbing-down poetry – in particular, by producing anthologies marketed like self-help manuals. She could call on the support of not only Keats, for whom “the great end of poesy” was “that it should be a friend” but also of Hart, who turns to poetry for the most powerful outpourings of human emotion, whether “joy, grief, sexual love or political passion. If I want to express it, I find it better in poetry”.

The Poet in the Garden, with Bloom, Walter and Rampling, is on Monday, April 11, at 7.30pm, in the Sheldonian Theatre. Daisy Goodwin introduces Poems to Last a Lifetime, with readings, on Thursday, April 14, at 6.30pm. The Hammer and Tongue Slam is on Friday, April 15, at 8pm. Simon Armitage and Nick Laird discuss their work on Sunday, April 17, at 4pm.

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