Christie's, which is auctioning a stained and frayed copy in New York, said the book could set a record price for American literature. Poe wrote the poems, inspired by the work of Byron, as he tried to launch his literary career after moving from his childhood home in Virginia to Boston, the city of his birth. He had at the time been trying to distance himself from his foster father, John Allan, in Richmond, Virginia, with whom he had a difficult relationship.

The book was published in complete obscurity, paid for entirely by the author and printed by a man who normally produced flyers and labels. When he later re-published the poems under his own name, Poe apologised for their quality and said they had never been intended for publication. A copy of the original book did not surface until more than 25 years after it was published, prompting some poetry experts at the time to claim it had never existed.

The poems can be listened to online or downloaded for later. Often the poets read their own work — as is the case for Rita Dove and Todd Boss, above. But former poet laureate Robert Pinsky reads Anne Bradstreet and the poem "Of Money" by Barnabe Googe — the latter, written more than 400 years ago, is still painfully true.

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The site was inspired by Pinsky's "Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Out Loud," published by W.W. Norton. All the poets featured on the site are with the publishing house, which has a pretty significant poetry roster. They caught up with many of them at a writers conference earlier this year and asked them "What is poetry for?" The answers include a lot of blank stares and some inspired off-the-cuff responses: "for tresspassing and feeling at home at the same time" and "change ... witness ... celebration."

The President of the QES, a man named Michael George Gibson (it may be a QES requirement to use three names), recently told the British newspaper The Guardian, "For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure, and second, alliteration and rhyme. Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems."

I'm sorry...word-things?

Anyway, the QES isn't alone. Here in America, a movement called New Formalism has been pushing for a return to formal verse for decades. The poet and critic Dana Gioia in his "Notes on New Formalism" ticked off what he perceived to be the problems with contemporary free verse poetry:

"The debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem. The revival of traditional forms will be seen then as only one response to this troubling situation."