The Poetry Society is a membership organisation, open to all, whose stated aim is "to promote the study, use and enjoyment of poetry".
The Society was founded in London in February 1909 as the Poetry Recital Society, becoming the Poetry Society in 1912. Its first President was Lady Margaret Sackville.
The Poetry Society publishes Poetry Review, Britain's leading poetry magazine, which provides a forum for poems from both new and established poets. Its editor from 2005 to 2012 was Fiona Sampson.
The Society organises several competitions, including the British National Poetry Competition, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, The Popescu Prize, The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and the Geoffrey Dearmer Award. The society also ran the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize from 1986 to 1997.
Famous quotes containing the words poetry and/or society:
“Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed.”
—William James (1842–1910)