‘To have great poets’, said Walt Whitman, ‘there must be great audiences’. Dead Poets Live is about putting poetry on the stage, drawing together the most exciting performers and the most inspiring venues to bring our greatest poets to new audiences.

We create theatre out of poems and poets. To date we have presented individual poets, poets in pairs and groups and themes, presented friends, rivals, lovers, alliances and dalliances – in whatever limit makes the poetry dramatic. Dead Poets Live has brought to the stage Byron and Shelley, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, Plath, Dickinson, Yeats, Lear, Pushkin, Stevie Smith, with performances from the likes of Glenda Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Denise Gough, Toby Jones, Charlotte Rampling, Rory Kinnear and Miranda Richardson.

The events are devised and supported by the T. S. Eliot Foundation, the proceeds going to charity.