The Nation's Favourite Poems

Forty-five of Britain's best-loved poems, read by John Nettles, Siobhan Redmond, Greg Wise and Emma Fielding.

In a national poll conducted to discover Britain's favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling's 'If -' was voted number one. This unique anthology brings together over forty poems from the poll, including the top ten.

Here is poignant war poetry (Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier' and Siegfried Sassoon's 'Everyone Sang' ); romantic verse such as Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?' and W. B. Yeats' 'When You Are Old'; Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear's great nonsense poems 'Jabberwocky' and 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat', and much more. Classics such as Wordsworth's 'The Daffodils' and Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shallot' sit alongside contemporary poetry like Allan Ahlberg's 'Please Mrs Butler' and Wendy Cope's 'Bloody Men'.

Superbly read by John Nettles, Siobhan Redmond, Greg Wise and Emma Fielding, this popular collection includes many of the very best examples ofBritish verse, as chosen by poetry lovers nationwide.

The poems included in this collection are:

1 'If -' by Rudyard Kipling, read by John Nettles
2 'The Lady of Shallot' by Alfred Lord Tennyson, read by Siobhan Redmond
3 'The Listeners' by Walter de la Mare, read by Greg Wise
4 'Not Waving but Drowning' by Stevie Smith, read by Siobhan Redmond
5 'The Daffodils' by William Wordsworth, read by John Nettles
6 'To Autumn' by John Keats, read by Siobhan Redmond
7 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' by William Butler Yeats, read by Emma Fielding
8 'Dulce et Decorum Est' by Wilfred Owen, read by Greg Wise
9 'Ode to a Nightingale' by John Keats, read by Siobhan Redmond
10 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' by William Butler Yeats, read by John Nettles
11 'Remember' by Christina Rossetti, read by Siobhan Redmond
12 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' by Thomas Gray, read by John Nettles
13 'Fern Hill' by Dylan Thomas, read by John Nettles
14 'Leisure' by William Henry Davies, read by Emma Fielding
15 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes, read by Greg Wise
16 'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell, read by Greg Wise
17 'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold, read by John Nettles
18 'The Tyger' by William Blake, read by John Nettles
19 'Adlestrop' by Edward Thomas, read by Siobhan Redmond
20 'The Soldier' by Rupert Brooke ,read by Greg Wise
21 'Sea-Fever' by John Masefield, read by John Nettles
22 'Upon Westminster Bridge' by William Wordsworth, read by Greg Wise
23 'How Do I Love Thee?' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, read by Emma Fielding
24 'Cargoes' by John Masefield, read by Greg Wise
25 'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll, read by Emma Fielding
26 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, read by John Nettles
27 'Ozymandias of Egypt' by Percy Bysshe Shelley, read by Greg Wise
28 'Abou ben Adhem' by Leigh Hunt, read by John Nettles
29 'Everyone Sang' by Siegfried Sassoon, read by Greg Wise
30 'The Windhover' by Gerard Manley Hopkins, read by Siobhan Redmond
31 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' by Dylan Thomas, read by John Nettles
32 'Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?' by William Shakespeare, read by Siobhan Redmond
33 'When You Are Old' by William Butler Yeats, read by Emma Fielding
34 'Lessons of the War (To Alan Mitchell): Naming of Parts' by Henry Reed, read by John Nettles
35 'The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy, read by Emma Fielding
36 'Please Mrs Butler' by Allan Ahlberg, read by Emma Fielding
37 'Kubla Khan' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, read by John Nettles
38 'Home-Thoughts, from Abroad' by Robert Browning, read by Greg Wise
39 'High Flight (An Airman's Ecstasy)' by John Gillespie Magee, read by Greg Wise
40 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' by Edward Lear ,read by Emma Fielding
41 'The Glory of the Garden' by Rudyard Kipling, read by Greg Wise
42 'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost, read by Siobhan Redmond
43 'The Way through the Woods' by Rudyard Kipling, read by Emma Fielding
44 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by Wilfred Owen, read by Greg Wise
45 'Bloody Men' by Wendy Cope, read by Siobhan Redmond

Since the 1960s the very best of BBC radio’s spoken word output has been available to own, first on record and cassette and now on CD and digital download. In addition to its extensive backlist catalogue, BBC Audio continues to publish a wide range of entertainment drawn from recent radio programming and the BBC archive.

Comedy titles include Hancock’s Half Hour, The Goon Show, Round the Horne, Cabin Pressure, Ed Reardon’s Week, Just a Minute and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. The realms of fantasy are depicted in Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. There’s radio drama based on the works of some of our most popular and significant writers including William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Anthony Trollope, Arthur Conan Doyle, Samuel Pepys and Alan Bennett. History, science and culture epics include A History of the World in 100 Objects, This Sceptred Isle, A History of Childhood and The Making of Music.

These are many more titles are waiting to be discovered in the BBC Audio collection, available from bookshops and online retailers. More information about the BBC’s spoken word radio services can be found at /

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