Booksellers expect The Romantic Poets, a set of 10 compact discs featuring the words of Byron, Blake and Wordsworth read by British actors familiar from imported television programmes, to sell far more than the same works in print.

Next month’s release of the CDs, which feature Sir Derek Jacobi, Prunella Scales and Douglas Hodge, seems to coincide with a new appetitie for verse; young Americans who would never pick up a poetry book are listening to verse for the first time outside school.

Many have been introduced to it through the street rhymes of rap. Music stars such as Smokey Robinson, Lauryn Hill and Kanye West have taken part in Def Poetry Jam, a weekly “poetry slam”, or reading, on the HBO TV channel sandwiched between The Sopranos and Sex and the City.

Young people are also downloading poetry to enjoy during journeys to work.

While book sales remained largely flat last year, sales of verse on CD rose by 7%, according to HarperCollins, the publisher. Internet downloads of poetry collections rose by an even more remarkable 40%.

Pam Promer, audio buyer for the Borders bookshop chain, said: “It’s a niche, like folk music, but the arrival of more lively poetry performances has meant that we are reaching people seeking an alternative to music on their way to work. And that is change.”

The Washington-based Audio Publishers Association said the British had always pioneered the spoken word in America. The first poetry to be released on audio in the US was Dylan Thomas performing Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night in New York in 1952.

Amazon, the internet bookseller, said advance orders indicated The Romantic Poets would be “a poetic blockbuster”.

“Poets like W H Auden and Sylvia Plath speaking their own verse are steady sellers, but the Brits are clearly dominating the compilations,” said an Amazon spokesman last week.

“Recently we have seen The Best of Second World War Poetry, read by Martin Jarvis and Phil Collins, and Seven Ages, a compilation including John Cleese and Michael Caine. So with the audio version of the Harry Potters doing so well we hope the Romantic poets will reach a younger generation who will listen to verse as part of an oral tradition.”

Young, alternative poets are also gaining a following. The Rose That Grew from Concrete, by Tupac Shakur, the murdered rap artist, is a bestseller while Amber Tamblyn, a young actress and star of the TV series Joan of Arcadia, has just published her own teenage odes.

Even Hollywood has noticed the trend. Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, is adopting the Old English epic poem Beowulf for the screen.

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