Poems for Learning and Reciting

Poetry by Heart

A Treasury of Poems to Read Aloud

Familiar poems and almost unknown poems. Love poems and war poems. Funny poems and heartbroken poems. Poems that re-create the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. 
 
Poetry by Heart is an essential collection of over 200 poems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Emily Dickinson, from Christina Rossetti to Benjamin Zephaniah, all carefully chosen for their suitability for learning and reciting. This is an anthology which celebrates the age-old pleasure of reciting poems - an anthology for all ages to treasure.

The poems we learn stay with us for the rest of our lives. They become personal and invaluable, and what's more they are free gifts - there for the taking

Sir Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 till 2009, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Jean Sprackland's Tilt won the Costa Poetry award in 2008. She is a Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie Blake is the Director of the national poetry recitation competition Poetry By Heart which she co-founded with Sir Andrew Motion in 2012. Mike Dixon is an educational consultant specializing in English in the classroom.

Stephen Regan

Andrew Motion

If you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you

Poignant … memorable … impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the task of grieving for the threatened loss of an entire world

A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love

The giants of the genre are well presented … there are discoveries aplenty … so monumental is this anthology that one can imagine it pillowing a knight’s head on an elaborately carved marble tomb

Funny, angry and provocative … the anthology is a success ... the editors’ introduction is excellent – clear, informative and thought-provoking

Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation

Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. 
 
In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Terrance Hayes and Alice Oswald. 
 
The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language, The Penguin Book of Elegy is a profound and moving compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.

Andrew Motion

Praise for The Penguin Book of Elegy

If you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you

Poignant … memorable … impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the tas ...

A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love

If you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you

Poignant … memorable … impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the tas ...

A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love

If you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you

Poignant … memorable … impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the tas ...

A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love

Books by Andrew Motion

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