Scottish Poetry Library

Bringing people and poems together is at the heart of everything we do – our mission. With this in mind, we’ll strive for our visitors, borrowers and service users to experience the SPL as a welcoming and compassionate organisation, aiming to transform people’s lives through exciting experiences and creative engagement with poetry – the ‘spark o’ Nature’s fire’ as Robert Burns wrote.

As a membership organisation, we encourage younger people and students to join and connect with us and with poetry for the rest of their lives. We also seek to reach out to communities that are traditionally underrepresented in our audiences, often the result of real and perceived barriers connected to limitations of low income, physical ability, low literacy and sense of belonging.

John Burnside wrote that ‘the more imaginative we are, the more compassionate we become’. By supporting the poetry community, creative learning programmes in schools and community settings, and offering increased access to poetry in live literature events and high-quality online resources, we support imagination. And in supporting imagination, we aim to demonstrate the compassion in poetry and affirm that, as writer and former SPL Board member Jenni Fagan puts it, ‘Poetry belongs in every community’.