BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please is the longest-running broadcast of verse anywhere in the world. First aired in 1979, the programme, a request show which broadcasts to two million listeners a week, has become a unique record of best-loved poems over the decades since its inception.
The BBC has looked back through its rich archive of recordings to produce a poll of the most asked for and most broadcast pieces ever. This selection of fifty poems includes works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Blake, Rupert Brooke, Lord Byron, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, John Keats, Edward Lear, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, William Wordsworth, and W.B. Yeats.