Edward Woodley Bowling was apparently a rector at the Church of All Saints in Houghton Conquest, Bedfordshire, England in the late 1800's, this poem is taken from Sagittulae, Random Verses. In this book's introduction he writes "The general reader will probably think that some apology is due to him from me for publishing verses of so crude and trivial a character. I can only say that the smallest of bows should sometimes be unstrung, and that if my little arrows are flimsy and light they will, I trust, wound no one."

Jean McKishnie Blewett (4 November 1862 – 19 August 1934) was a Canadian journalist, author and poet. Blewett was a regular contributor to The Globe, a Toronto newspaper and in 1898 became editor of its Homemakers Department. In 1919, assisted by the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, she published a booklet titled Heart Stories to benefit war charities. During this time she regularly lectured on topics such as temperance and suffragism. She used the pseudonym Katherine Kent for some of her writing...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 recordings of Lines Addressed to an Old Bachelor by James McIntyre. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 27, 2013.Another poem from Canada's cheese poet, James McIntyre.

A treasure trove of more than two hundred poems, this gem of an anthology compiled by Mary E Burt is indeed a most valuable set of poems to read or listen to. Published in 1904, Poems Every Child Should Know contains some well-loved verses like Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Lewis Carroll's delightful parody Father William, Felicia Hemans' deeply-moving Casablanca and other favorites. It also has lesser-known but equally beautiful pieces like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Arrow and The Song, Robert Browning's The Incident of the French Camp, Eugene Field's nonsense lyrics Wynken, Blynken and Nod and a host of other wonderful verses...

Beowulf is a long narrative poem composed in Old English some time in between the 8th and 11th century AD. The only surviving manuscript that contains the poem is preserved in the British Library and it too was badly damaged by fire in 1731. It is considered to be the oldest surviving work of poetry in English and one of the rare pieces of vernacular European literature that has survived since Medieval times. A prince arrives to rid a neighboring country of a terrible monster. He mortally wounds the horrendous creature and it retreats to die in its lair in the remote mountains...

Here are 37 distinctively American poems, covering the mid-17th – early 20th Centuries, from Anne Bradstreet to Dorothy Parker’s sole PD work.

This collection includes 40 different Christmas carols collected and read by Douglas D. Anderson, the creator of The Hymns and Carols of Christmas website, a public-domain collection of Christmas music containing over 2,600 hymns, carols and songs.

Short Poetry Collection 001: a collection of 29 public-domain poems.

Long Poems Collection 1: a collection of 5 public-domain poems longer than 5 minutes in length.

A collection of romantic poems for St Valentine’s day.

This collection recognizes Black History Month, February 2007. Two excellent resources for public domain African American writing are African American Writers (Bookshelf) and The Book of American Negro Poetry, edited by James Weldon Johnson. Johnson’s collection inspired the Harlem Renaissance generation to establish a firm African-American literary tradition in the United States.

A collection of classic Christian hymns spanning the centuries. Some of the hymns are read; others are sung.

The Cathay poems appeared in a slim volume in 1915. They are, in effect, Ezra Pound’s English translations/ interpretations from notebooks written by the Japanese scholar Ernest Fenollosa. Pound, not knowing any Chinese or Japanese at all, promptly created a new and somewhat complex style of translation, as he had done with words from several other languages. The Cathay poems are primarily written by the Chinese poet Li Po, refered to throughout these translations as Rihaku, the Japanese form of his name...

First collection of sung and spoken folk ballads (13 in collection).

A heartwarming collection of nursery rhymes that will take you back to your childhood!

In this saga, the events that led to Eirik the Red’s banishment to Greenland are chronicled, as well as Leif Eirikson’s discovery of Vinland the Good (a place where wheat and grapes grew naturally), after his longboat was blown off-course. By geographical details, this place is surmised to be present-day Newfoundland, and is likely the first European discovery of the American mainland, some five centuries before Christopher Columbus’s journey.

In honor of Kristin and Corey’s wedding (April 2006) we’ve recorded a selection of wedding-themed poems. Congratulations, you two!

A selection of twenty hymns sung in this recording.

This is a sequel of sorts to 37 American Poems, one of my first solos. Concentration here is on late 19th to early 20th Century works by US poets.

In this celebration of diversity, learn about the myriad histories and cultures behind our volunteers.