Rhyme and Reason by Mark Forsyth
Atlantic Books
Published 16th October 2025
'Enchanting' Stephen Fry
Did you know
Lord Byron sold more books in a day than Jane Austen did in her lifetime
During the First World War there were more women poets published than soldier poets
A kitchen-maid became one of the most popular poets of the 18th century
Some people worry that they don't appreciate poetry; but English poetry wasn't written to be appreciated, it was written to be enjoyed. For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment - for fun, romance, religion and entertainment - and this is a book about those people. Rhyme & Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, and into the heart of Byromania and the Victorian hearth, to help you understand why poetry has had such an enduring hold on the British psyche.
From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings, it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.
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