For the last year and a half, students of Marie McAllister have been creating a listening archive of 18th century poetry. The project, which began as an effort to help students struggling to understand older poetry, operates under the premise that hearing someone read a poem aloud can help clarify its meaning. In addition, the creators of the site also believe that listening to poetry is fun and that many of these texts were written with the intention that they would be read aloud and serve as a source of entertainment.

Every semester, Professor McAllister’s students have added additional poems to the archive, both in the form of orginal recordings and by linking to the wealth of audio resources available through sites like PennSound and LibriVox.The archive currently has over 250 poems listed, and it continues to grow.

We leave you with a poem listed in the archive, Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to her Book” read by Alan Davis-Drake and available at LibriVox.

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