Customer Reviews

81 Famous Poems

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A worthwhile collection, but a track listing didn't seem to be included with my CDs, nor is it posted here. So here are the tracks as I wrote them down while they were playing. (And if you count carefully, you'll notice there are only 80 tracks listed, not 81. Two of EB Browning's sonnets are together in one track.)

CD-1
01. Anonymous Early Song: The Cuckoo Song
02. Sir Thomas Wyatt: Whoso List to Hunt
03. Sir Walter Raleigh: The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
04. Sir Walter Raleigh: The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage
05. Sir Philip Sidney: Sonnet 1 from Astrophel and Stella
06. Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
07. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 18 - Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
08. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 29 - When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
09. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 116 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds
10. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 129 - Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
11. Thomas Campion: When to Her Lute Corina Sings
12. Thomas Campion: Rose-cheeked Laura
13. Thomas Campion: There is a Garden in Her Face
14. John Dunne: Song - Go and catch a falling star
15. John Dunne: The Sun Rising
16. John Dunne: Sonnet 10 from Holy Sonnets - Death, be not proud
17. Ben Johnson: Song: To Celia
18. Robert Herrick: The Argument of His Book
19. Robert Herrick: Delight in Disorder
20. Robert Herrick: To the Virgins to Make Much of Time
21. Robert Herrick: Upon Julia's Clothes
22. George Herbert: The Collar
23. George Herbert: The Pulley
24. George Herbert: Love (III)
25. John Milton: When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (a.k.a. On His Blindness)
26. John Suckling: Song - Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
27. John Suckling: Out upon It! (aka The Constant Lover)
28. Richard Lovelace: To Althea, from Prison
29. Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
30. Andrew Marvell: The Definition of Love
31. Henry Vaughan: The Retreat
32. John Dryden: A Song for St. Cecilia's Day
33. Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
34. William Blake: from Poetical Sketches, Song
35. William Blake: from Songs of Innocence, Introduction
36. William Blake: from Songs of Innocence, The Lamb
37. William Blake: from Songs of Experience, The Tyger
38. Robert Burns: To Mouse
39. Robert Burns: A Red, Red Rose
40. William Wordsworth: She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
41. William Wordsworth: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
42. William Wordsworth: My Heart Leaps Up
43. William Wordsworth: The World Is Too Much With Us
44. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan

CD-2
01. George Gordon, Lord Byron: She Walks in Beauty
02. George Gordon, Lord Byron: When We Two Parted
03. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
04. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to the West Wind
05. Percy Bysshe Shelley: To a Skylark
06. Percy Bysshe Shelley: Adonais (stanzas 1, 39, 54, and 55)
07. John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
08. John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn
09. John Keats: Bright Star
10. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Concord Hymn
11. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Rhodora
12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese: 1, 43
13. Edgar Allan Poe: To Helen
14. Edgar Allan Poe: The City in the Sea
15. Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee
16. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Break, Break, Break
17. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Songs from The Princess, The Splendor Falls
18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Tears, Idle Tears
19. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
20. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Eagle
21. Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar
22. Robert Browning: My Last Duchess
23. Robert Browning: Home-Thoughts from Abroad
24. Walt Whitman: Song of Myself (parts 1, 6, 21 and 31)
25. Walt Whitman: O Captain! My Captain!
26. Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
27. Emily Dickinson: 303 - The Soul selects her own Society
28. Emily Dickinson: 986 - A narrow Fellow in the Grass
29. Christina Rossetti: Up-Hill
30. Algernon Charles Swinburne: The Garden of Proserpine
31. Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
32. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty
33. Alfred Edward Housman: Lovliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
34. Alfred Edward Housman: With Rue My Heart Is Laden
35. William Butler Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree
36. William Butler Yeats: The Wild Swans at Coole

We dedicated fans of poetry audiobooks must be über-masochists, considering how abysmally few of these recordings (including virtually all anthologies from Audible.com) provide us with acceptable TOCs, or even deign to match the narrators to their poems in multi-narrator** collections. Yet we still fork over our loot ($$$) and (mostly) enjoy our purchases!

Kudos to previous reviewer William Roarshock for his painstaking and generous contribution of the Track Listing. That still leaves the purchaser/listener of "81 Famous Poems" (a fine poetry collection, by the way) not knowing who narrates each poem. Fortunately there are only three narrators (identified in the product description as "authors") in this compilation, and one of them is female: that would be Nancy Wickwire (1925-1974).

Of the two men, one, Bramwell Fletcher (1904-1988), was British; the other, Alexander Scourby (1913-1985), American. And so by their accents ye shall know them.

For interested parties, all three narrators are profiled in Wikipedia. Alas, it's rarely this "easy" -- even with the major effort of William Roarshock and my own comparatively miniscule detective work -- to identify pertinent equivalent information about other audiobooks.
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**For multi-narrator poetry collections, a method that sometimes works -- at least when readers are represented in Audible's considerable stable of eminent poetry/prose narrators -- is to search for readers in their "Search By"-->"Narrator" box at http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/homepage ; by honing in on single-narrator works and listening to the short free excerpt; you can get pretty good at recognizing voices.

Finally, though, about all you can do for untitled poems in these audiobooks is to listen and search for interesting lines (typed between quotation marks) via Google. You'll find almost all poets and poem titles on the web that way.
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But REALLY -- notwithstanding its "educational value" -- isn't this a ridiculous amount of work, an untenable burden really, for Amazon (in its avatars as Amazon.com, Audible.com, and of course Kindle) to place on its most dedicated customers?!! Sigh ... I suppose this must remain a rhetorical question.

I got just what I wanted:great English language recorded poems.The readings are rpofessional and the choice is pretty logical considering the amount of space,otherwise you'd need twenty CDs to record the most important English literature poems...and still you might say that many gems were left out.
Of course anyone might say that ...maybe some more Shakespeare sonnets or Coleridge or T.S. Eliot...would have made this collection more perfect.
Anthologies are not made to please everyone.