the ear is the best reader

"When Frost said 'the ear is the best reader' he didn't mean to say that he preferred the fleeting voice to the substantial page, but to give them both equal value, and to remind us how they depended on one another. The point can be proved very easily. A poem creates its effects not simply by sharing an explicable meaning with its reader, but by dramatising that meaning and making it intimate - by the musicality (or not) of the words, by rhythm, by rhyme, by recurring patterns of sound, by disruptions, and by the movement and evolution of tone through a whole piece of work. It is a demonstration of harmonies, in all sorts of ways. More than that, even, the sound of a poem can actually become its meaning"


Andrew Motion (London, 1952), an excerpt from the article Listening to Poetry, published at The Poetry Archive, a comprehensive and expanding archive of recordings of poets reading their own work, available online for free


Further reading:

Classic poets' voices go online (BBC)

Motion cheers online poem archive (BBC)

Andrew Motion celebrates the rise and rise of the Poetry Archive (The Times)

Poetry Archive unveils lost voices (The Guardian)