The lyrics of many of the world’s leading musicians have often been compared with poetry, but now the record-buying public will be offered the real thing with the release of an album featuring famous actors reading classic poetic works.

A band of stars led by Joanna Lumley have recorded 27 poems for a charity album, Words For You, that will be released by Universal next month. It qualifies for the chart because the verse has been set to classical music.

Announced to coincide with National Poetry Day today, the album is to receive a fierce promotional push, including a television advertising campaign, as the industry targets a growing band of middle-aged consumers who pushed Dame Vera Lynn to the top of the album chart last month.

The celebrities involved have waived their royalties so that a proportion of proceeds can be donated to I CAN, the children’s charity, but Universal is adamant that the album makes sound commercial sense.

Ted Cockle, co-president of Island Records, a division of Universal, said: “The reason we’ve done this is very easy to explain; it’s a straight assessment of a market.

“For the last three or four years there have been The Priests, Vera Lynn, Bocelli, there’s a whole market out there that are opting for something that isn’t traditional pop.

“It’s a growing market and one not really blighted by legions of people copying it over the internet.”

Last month Dame Vera, 92, became the oldest living artist to top the album charts after older generations, who eschew internet piracy and tend to buy CDs in supermarkets, flocked to buy her greatest hits record.

Universal will ship 100,000 copies of the new album to stores, such is their confidence that it will sell. Mr Cockle added: “It is a bizarre concoction but it provides a lift of the heart. The poems are reoccuring favourites for everyone who has an interest in poetry. It’s a very thought-provoking collection.”

Lumley’s contribution to the record is a recital of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, set to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 8, as well as a reading of a John Betjeman poem. Others on the album include Honor Blackman, reading Daffodils by William Wordsworth, set to Tchaikovsky and Geoffrey Palmer, the actor, who will read three poems, including one by Robert Browning, accompanied by Dvorak.

Other celebrations to mark National Poetry Day include a 40ft by 40ft patchwork poem knitted by more than 1,000 people and displayed outside the British Library in London.

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