SIX YEARS AGO, SHORTLY after I became Poet Laureate, my publishers, Faber, asked me to record a selection of my poems. The studio work was done by Richard Carrington, a recording producer whom I knew by reputation: several writer-friends had said how expert he was, and how sympathetic.

As we chatted afterwards, I said that I thought it was a pity that no one had thought to record poets in a systematic way, from the time that the technology first became available in the late 19th century.

That way, some of the lamentable gaps in our sound heritage would have been filled. What do you mean, Richard asked, a visionary gleam coming into his eyes. Well, I said, we have recordings of Tennyson and Browning and Whitman, but we don’t have Hardy, or Lawrence, or Housman.

There and then, we decided to do something about it: the internet, we thought, made it possible to collect and share an archive of recordings in a way that had not previously been possible: it would allow the sound-sense of poetry to re-establish its proper partnership with page-sense.

In the next few weeks, we began making lists of poets whom we might approach to make new recordings, asking funding bodies to help, and planning how we might add components to the site that would be of particular use to school pupils, students and their teachers.

Most of those we contacted were surprised that a comprehensive collection didn’t exist — although several organisations, such as the National Sound Archive, for instance, and the BBC do hold important selections of voices.

A number of small grants helped to keep the project afloat in the early days; then the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation stepped in; then the Esmée Fairburn Foundation, the Department for Education and Skills, Nesta (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England (among others) gave us generous support that has been crucial.

I first started thinking seriously about sound-sense when I began reading poetry as a teenager — thanks largely to T. S. Eliot. In several of his essays, he argues that poems can communicate with us even though we might not fully understand what they are saying and when I listened to recordings of him reading The Waste Land I thought I knew what he meant. While the notorious difficulties of that poem often baffled me and the allusions bewildered me, I felt intensely moved and engrossed by its music.

A few years later, when I was writing my thesis on Edward Thomas, and pondering the influence of his friend Robert Frost, my interest quickened. Frost’s remarks about “the sound of sense”, in particular, described a process that I felt I recognised.

“The living part of a poem,” Frost says, “is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom and meaning of a sentence. It is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation . . . It goes and the language becomes a dead language, the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables but that are shifted at will with the sense. Vowels have length, there is no denying. But the accent of sense supercedes all other accent, overrides and sweeps it away.”

These convictions lie close to the heart of the Poetry Archive, which at the time of launching contains almost 100 voices: the great majority being new recordings that we have made ourselves, alongside a good many “historic” ones. (By “historic”, we mean recordings made before we began our project, ranging from the late 19th century to more recent times.) We intend to record many more contemporary poets and also to track down and add all the significant historic recordings we can find. If anyone has Hardy’s voice in their attic, please tell us.

In the five years that we have been planning the site, our original thoughts have been elaborated in ways that we hope will interest and entertain existing poetry-lovers and engage new readers, especially through various educational components. The Children’s Archive and the elements for students and teachers all offer advice, information, lesson plans, and interviews with writers, in ways designed to be both serious and fun. They have benefited tremendously from the help of colleagues who joined our small team at the archive: Andrew Bailey, Esther Morgan and Jean Sprackland.

I occasionally hear complaints that “poets don’t read their own work well” — usually from people who never go to poetry readings. The recordings on the archive disprove this time and again. Some poets read with theatrical authority (Christopher Logue), some with antique grandeur (Edith Sitwell), some with a kind of grave skittishness (Margaret Atwood), some with emotional simplicity (Charles Causley). Whatever the style, the value of hearing a poet’s own voice deliver their own words is enormous.

The various accents, tones, manners, speeds, pauses, inflections and emphases are a profound help to understanding, and fascinating in themselves. The Poetry Archive, which opens on Wednesday, allows us to appreciate this and to benefit from it, across an enormous range. Happy listening.

www.poetryarchive.org

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