Showing results by narrator "Evan Blackmore" in All Categories

In 1892, Alfred Tennyson, the official Poet Laureate of Great Britain, died. According to custom, a new Laureate now had to be chosen by the Prime Minister. But on this occasion, uniquely, there was a problem. Many different candidates for the position were suggested, but for several years, none were chosen. In this recording, we listen to selected poems by Tennyson himself and by ten writers nominated to succeed him.

As he himself said, Drayton’s sonnets are the most “sportive” of the great Elizabethan love poems, “ever in motion,” by turns “wild, madding, jocund, and irregular,” yet maintaining a universality and sturdy good sense that have spoken to the hearts of hearers and readers for four centuries. This recording includes in full not only his famous final collection, Idea (1619), but also the earlier Idea’s Mirror (1594), as well as the various love sonnets that he wrote on other occasions.

The 16 Evening Voluntaries, the great work of Wordsworth's old age, are half-serious, half-playful meditations designed to take the mind away from "its daily share of earth's unrest" and "the petty pleasures of the garish day," helping us to "walk content with Nature's way," and putting us to rest—the rest that "smooths the way for sleep."

Here are two of the very earliest surviving Robin Hood stories: Robin Hood and the Potter and Robin Hood and the Knight, both dating from the end of the Middle Ages. Here are Robin Hood, Little John, and the Sheriff of Nottingham, as they were described in the days when knights and monks and potters and outlaws really did go riding, at least occasionally, through the forests of England.

Butchers, bakers, brewers, businessmen, farmers, fabric workers, entertainers, comedians, gluttons, lechers, spongers and swindlers, prostitutes and parasites, the pope and his priests, the king and his courtiers, compete for attention in this lively and subversive vision of corruption in fourteenth-century England.

Who was the bestselling English poet of the nineteenth century? No, not Tennyson or Byron or Wordsworth—but Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), “the most considerable woman poet of the Romantic period” and “the most notable British poet flourishing between the death of Byron and the rise of Tennyson and the Brownings” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008). With an unfailing and seemingly effortless command of language, she voiced the deepest concerns of ordinary people, especially women, to an extent that no other writer of her time could do.

L. E. L. was the pen-name of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), a “wild and wayward girl” whose outspoken poems about love, hypocrisy, social injustice, religions, and death were discussed and debated avidly during her short life, but lost favor afterwards as Victorian notions of propriety became dominant. This wide-ranging collection includes 60 of her most characteristic poems.

Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791-1864) was perhaps the most popular and influential American poet of her time. Deeply concerned with social injustices of all kinds, she was already speaking out against such problems as slavery, war, and the persistent mistreatment of Native Americans as early as the 1820s. She was equally at home in comedy and tragedy, and continued to publish with unabated zest and incisiveness for half a century. In all, she is estimated to have written over 2,000 poems.

Sixty-nine poems by six of the most admired women Romantic writers—English, Scottish, Irish, and American: Dorothy Wordsworth (William Wordsworth’s sister), Joanna Baillie, Eliza Townsend, Mary Tighe, Sara Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter), and Caroline Bowles Southey. Each in her own way, they all broke with the poetic conventions of the past, writing in ordinary language about ordinary people, and approaching the traditional subjects of poetry with fresh eyes. Comedy and tragedy, love and hatred, life and death, oppression and freedom—they’re all here.

This collection includes favorite English-language poems by 178 favorite authors, beginning with Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke in Elizabethan times, and ending with T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore in the twentieth century. Cavaliers and Puritans, a famous king and a pilloried criminal, soulful lovers and sharp-witted satirists, Shakespeare and Jonson, Milton and Marvell, David Garrick and Rabindranath Tagore, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Christina Rossetti—all are here, in one constantly changing kaleidoscope of brilliant verse.

This collection of classic poems of compassion and consolation on various subjects ranges from Wordsworth’s own bereavements to hardships faced by people in other times and other places.

Here are the best-loved poems from the final phase of Robert Browning's long and ever-productive career—sharp-eyed and quick-witted, brimming with zest and verve and sparkle, yet equally keen to probe the "bad dreams," the dim-seen, sinister crannies within the human soul.

This collection contains 201 lively little poems by the most playful of English Golden Age writers, Robert Herrick.

Alexander Pope was the most influential and most admired writer of his time, famous for satirical and reflective poems such as The Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Man. His lyrical poems are tantalizingly few in number but predictably high in quality, with all the beauty of sound and incisiveness of sense familiar from his other works.