The Great Poets – Walt Whitman
The Great Poets –
By Walt Whitman
Narrated by Garrick Hagon / 1 hour 36 minutes
Seer, prophet, visionary, preacher, Walt Whitman stands out as one of poetry’s towering anomalies: in celebrating the trees, water, sky and air, the bear, the eagle, the buffalo and the lion, Whitman expressed a uniquely democratic vision that engulfs not only the American continent but the entire universe. His passionate vehemence, his faith in... Read More »
The Great Poets – Emily Dickinson
The Great Poets –
By Emily Dickinson
Narrated by Teresa Gallagher / 1 hour 19 minutes
Born in Massachusetts in 1830, Emily Dickinson composed over 1770 poems; but apart from her closest friends, no-one knew she was writing at all. Only after her death was her astonishing output discovered and published. A reclusive figure for much of her life, few could have imagined the range of her subjects, the intensity of her imagination or... Read More »
The Great Poets – William Blake
The Great Poets –
By William Blake
Narrated by Robert Glenister / 1 hour 2 minutes
Naxos AudioBooks begins its new series of Great Poets – represented by their most popular poems on one CD – with William Blake, whose 250th anniversary of birth falls this year. This CD contains all of his most popular works – Tyger, the Auguries of Innocence, Jerusalem, as well as some lesser-known poetry that demonstrates the range and power... Read More »
The Great Poets – John Keats
The Great Poets –
By John Keats
Narrated by Samuel West / 1 hour 6 minutes
Naxos AudioBooks continues its new series of Great Poets – represented by a collection of their most popular poems on one CD – with John Keats. Although this man had a short life, he produced a series of outstanding poems – many of which appeared first in letters to his sister. He was largely unappreciated during his lifetime, and died in Rome... Read More »
The Great Poets – John Donne
The Great Poets –
By John Donne
Narrated by Geoffrey Whitehead / 1 hour 9 minutes
Sophisticated wit and intense emotion, religious fervour and erotic sensuality, delight in life’s pleasures and fascination with death, are all to be found in the paradoxical poetry of John Donne. One of the foremost metaphysical poets, Donne’s ingenious metaphors and inspired use of language has earned him affection and reverence in near equal... Read More »
The Great Poets – John Milton
The Great Poets –
By John Milton
Narrated by Samantha Bond / 1 hour 18 minutes
Milton stands alongside Shakespeare and the Bible in the power of his verse and its continuing impact. He is one of the great voices of English poetry. Born in 1608, he is best known for his epic Paradise Lost, but most of his writing life was spent composing shorter works. This collection brings together his brilliant early poems, including Il... Read More »
The Great Poets – William Wordsworth
The Great Poets –
By William Wordsworth
Narrated by Oliver Ford Davies / 1 hour 17 minutes
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, in the Lake District. His Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge, was published in 1798, and shortly afterwards he settled in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with his sister Dorothy. Inspired in his early manhood by the French Revolution, he grew disillusioned with revolutionary... Read More »
The Great Poets – Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Great Poets –
By Alfred & Lord Tennyson
Narrated by Michael Pennington / 1 hour 6 minutes
The 200th anniversary of the birth of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), one of the most popular of poets, is celebrated in 2009. Works such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, Crossing the Bar and Tears, idle tears have made him an internationally famous figure, and the second most quoted writer of all time (after Shakespeare). Tennyson’s... Read More »
The Great Poets – The Great Poets – William McGonagall
The Great Poets –
By William Topaz McGonagall
Narrated by Gregor Fisher / 57 minutes
The idiosyncratic Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall has the unusual reputation as one of the worst poets in the English language with rhymes and rhythms that produce mirth rather than wonder. His masterpiece is The Tay Bridge Disaster. Scottish-born Gregor Fisher, who starred in Love Actually and other film and TV programmes, reads the key... Read More »
The Great Poets: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen
By Wilfred Owen
Narrated by Anton Lesser / 1 hour 18 minutes
No poet is more closely identified with the First World War than Wilfred Owen. His striking body of work, grim to the point of brutality yet, at the same time, majestic and awe-inspiring, defines the war for us. It is in each of these famous poems that Owen reflects on the four terrible months that he lived through; he conveys the experience of... Read More »
The Great Poets – W.B. Yeats
The Great Poets –
By W.B. Yeats
Narrated by Jim Norton / 1 hour 4 minutes
Naxos AudioBooks continues its new series of Great Poets – represented by a collection of their most popular poems on one CD – with W.B. Yeats, one of the most loved poets of the twentieth century. He left a large legacy of outstanding poems, and the finest are collected here: Down by the Salley Gardens, The Lake Isle of Inisfree, The Secret... Read More »
The Great Poets – John Clare
The Great Poets –
By John Clare
Narrated by David Shaw-Parker / 1 hour
John Clare was the forgotten Romantic poet, until the late twentieth century. Known by his contemporaries as the ‘Peasant Poet’ he recorded in his poems the natural landscape of rural England before the Industrial Revolution. His poems rival Wordsworth’s for their sensitivity to nature and pantheism: ‘I feel a beautiful providence ever about... Read More »
The Great Poets – Robert Burns
The Great Poets –
By Robert Burns
Narrated by Forbes Masson / 2 hours 56 minutes
The 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns (1759–1796), one of the most popular of poets, is celebrated in 2009. A pioneer of the Romantic movement, works such as A Red, Red Rose, A Man’s a Man for a’ That and the ubiquitous Auld Lang Syne, have made him an international figure. Naxos AudioBooks’ popular Great Poets series marks the... Read More »
The Great Poets – Robert Browning
The Great Poets –
By Robert Browning
Narrated by David Timson / 1 hour 16 minutes
Robert Browning’s popular poems The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News are often anthologised, but it is in his dramatic lyrics such as My Last Duchess and the chilling Porphyria’s Lover that his poetic genius shines. Browning, with his unusual use of language, can be a challenging poet, but one who is always rewarding.... Read More »
The Great Poets – Matthew Arnold
The Great Poets –
By Matthew Arnold
Narrated by Jonathan Keeble / 1 hour 18 minutes
Considered the bridge between romanticism and modernism, Matthew Arnold wrote verse that is simple, unadorned and straightforward. From the hypnotic and beautiful lines of Dover Beach to the pastoral narrative of The Scholar Gipsy, Arnold cast a gaze at the main intellectual issues of the nineteenth century while giving a timeless insight into... Read More »
The Great Poets – John Masefield
The Great Poets –
By John Masefield
Narrated by Ronald Pickup / 1 hour 7 minutes
John Masefield (1878–1967) was one of the most prolific, popular and successful poets of the twentieth century. Masefield broke upon Edwardian literature with the startling work entitled The Everlasting Mercy, which described the spiritual enlightenment of a drunken poacher. Over the span of his lifetime, he was appointed Poet Laureate and... Read More »
The Great Poets – Rudyard Kipling
The Great Poets –
By Rudyard Kipling
Narrated by Robert Glenister / 1 hour 12 minutes
This anthology contains many of Kipling’s most famous poems, If, Mandalay, Gunga Din. Though sometimes still regarded as a product of the colonial era, Kipling touches a very popular nerve in Britain’s literary tradition, and is regarded more generously now as a master of popular verse. It is often forgotten that he won the Nobel Prize for... Read More »
The Great Poets – Francesco Petrarch
The Great Poets –
By Francesco Petrarch
Narrated by Anton Lesser / 1 hour 1 minute
This 14th-century Italian poet was a model for many who followed him. His passionate sonnets to Laura became the epitome for love poetry. Over some 40 years he wrote 366 sonnets to Laura, whom he probably never even spoke to, and they remain immediate and affecting even now. Called Rime Sparse (Scattered Rhymes), they influenced Chaucer and many... Read More »
The Great Poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Great Poets –
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
Narrated by Bertie Carvel / 1 hour 18 minutes
Idealist, atheist, outcast, political radical and, of course, poet – Percy Bysshe Shelley was, in many ways, the epitome of the Romantic artist. His poetry was an outlet for his passionately-held and highly unpopular beliefs; beliefs which resulted in social exclusion, exile, and possibly even his premature death at the age of twenty-nine. His... Read More »
The Great Poets – Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Great Poets –
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Narrated by Jeremy Northam / 1 hour 1 minute
A collection of the best-known poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). One of the Victorian era’s greatest writers, Hopkins’ reputation has continued to grow since his death. Our Great Poets series, launched in 2007, has proven very popular, offering many of the best-loved poems by popular poets in an inexpensive 1 CD collection – and well... Read More »