A rare and thrilling listening experience. A choice gathering of some of the twentieth century's greatest poetry... read by the century's greatest poets
A reawakened love for the sound of poetry has made modern poems subtly different from the poems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centures. We have only to listen to these poets reading their own works to know how important their interpretations are to a full comprehension of their poems. The ministerial intonations of Eliot, the passionate orchestrations of Thomas, the very very precise formulations of Cummings, the easy conversational inflection of Frost are integral, lending subtle clarifications which go beyond the printed page.
The fact that this recording includes the voice of Yeats is something of a miracle. In the early 1930's, when the thought of recording poets occurred to few, Yeats himself made several recordings for radio broadcast. By sheer luck, an unmutilated copy was preserved; and now the rich and melodious voice can be heard by a new generation.
The Caedmon Poetry Collection eliminates the struggle for perfect communication between author and reader. Just listen and you'll understand...
Includes: William Butler Yeats -- The Song of the Old Mother; The Lake Isle of Innisfree; W.H. Auden -- In Memory of W.B. Yeats; Dylan Thomas -- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Fern Hill; Edith Sitwell -- Still Falls the Rain; May Swenson -- The DNA Molecule; Robert Graves -- Poem to My Son; Randall Jarrell -- Eighth Air Force; Archibald MacLeish -- Epistle to Be Left in the Earth; W.S. Merwin -- The Last One; Anne Sexton -- Divorce, Thy Name is Woman; Carl Sandburg -- The Windy City Fog; William Carlos Williams -- The Seafarer; E.E. Cummings -- darling! because my blood can sing, if everthing that happens can't be done; Joseph Brodsky -- Nature Morte, Letter from an Archaeologist; Robert Frost -- The Road Not Taken, After Apple-Picking; Derek Walcott -- Omeros, Book 1, Chapter 1; Robert Lowell -- Skunk Hour; Gertrude Stein -- If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso; Sylvia Plath -- The Thin People; Robert Penn Warren -- Sirocco; American Portrait: Old Style; Pablo Neruda -- Arte Poetica; Ezra Pound -- Moeurs Contemporaines; Wallace Stevens -- The Idea of Order At Key West; T.S. Eliot -- The Wasteland; and more.
