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By: Omar Khayyám (1048-1131)

Book cover The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Persian: رباعیات عمر خیام) is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A Persian ruba'i is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistechs) per line, hence the word "Rubáiyát" (derived from the Arabic root word for "four"), meaning "quatrains". (Introduction by Wikipedia) The three translations by women comprise this collection of recordings of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

By: Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Whinfield Translation) by Omar Khayyam The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Whinfield Translation)

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) was a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. In the Western world he is most famous for his many rubáiyát (quatrains), a four line rhyming stanza, which were popularized in an extensively reworked collection in English by Edward Fitzgerald, the first edition of which appeared in 1859. However, Fitzgerald was neither the first nor the most scholarly of the translators of Omar Khayyam’s rubáiyát. As well as translating the poems of Hafez and Rumi, Edward Henry Whinfield (1836-1922) also produced a much more extensive English version of the rubáiyát...

By: Omar Khayyám (1048-1131)

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Le Gallienne) by Omar Khayyám Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Le Gallienne)

Richard le Gallienne was an English poet and critic, who, although unfamiliar with the Persian language, had a profound interest in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In 1897 he published a collection of 211 quatrains, which was based on earlier English translations, in particular the prose version by Justin Huntly McCarthy. A expanded edition, containing fifty additional quatrains was published in 1901, and this has been used for the present recording.

Book cover Rubaiyat Miscellany

The translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald has remained the most celebrated rendering in English of the Persian poet's work. While several other scholars produced their own translations of the Rubaiyat, yet others contented themselves by just paraphrasing the work of Fitzgerald. This recording features three reworkings of previously published translations. Arthur Guiterman and Ruel William Whitney based their renderings on the Fifth Edition of Fitzgerald's translation and Richard Le Gallienne, a distinguished poet in his own right, compiled his version from a variety of sources, in particular the prose translation by Justin Huntly McCarthy...

Book cover Quatrains of Omar Khayyam of Nishapur

In 1906, Eben Francis Thompson,scholar and poet, published a limited edition of his translation of the Quatrains of Omar Khayyam. This edition contains 878 quatrains, and represents the most extensive translation of Omar's rubai in any language.In the Introduction, Nathan Haskell Dole writes: Mr Thompson has put into English verse this whole body of Persian poetry. It is a marvel of close translation, accurate and satisfactory. He has succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do - to add nothing and to take nothing away, but to put into the typical quatrain, as determined by Fitzgerald and others, exactly what Omar and his unknown imitators said.

Book cover Strophes of Omar Khayyám

One of the earliest versions of Omar Khayyám's quatrains by an American translator is John Leslie Garner's collection, published in 1888. It contains 152 quatrains, which the translator calls "Strophes." The collection is divided into eleven books, introduced by quotations from Bourne's "Anacreon," Leconte de Lisle, Giordano Bruno, Goethe, Alfred de Musset, Paul Bourget, Marcus Antoninus, St. James, Sully-Prudhomme, Edmund Waller, and Escriva.In his preface Garner says : "The collection might have been made much larger, but it was deemed inadvisable, as Omar's themes are not many, and the ever-recurring Wine, Rose, and Nightingale are somewhat cloying to Occidental senses...

Book cover Rubaiyat of Umar Khaiyam

In 1867 Jean Baptiste Nicolas , scholar and career diplomat, published the first major French translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This version is in prose and the collection contains 464 verses.In Nicolas’ view, Omar was no Epicurean reveler but rather a relentless spiritual seeker – his frequent allusions to wine and lovers are metaphors, expressive of a divine discontent that can only be resolved by union with a mystical beloved. However, most other translators and commentators regard Omar as a man who sampled and enjoyed both earthly and philosophical delights...

Book cover Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

While the translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald has become the best known English language version of this classic poem, it is neither the most complete or accurate rendering of Omar's oeuvre. Among others, E.A.Johnson spent nearly thirty years translating all 762 verses of the Lucknow Edition of the Rubaiyat. Apart from this singular publication, the life and activities of the translator remain hidden in obscurity. - Summary by Algy Pug

Book cover Quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nishapour

The quatrains of Omar Kheyyam of Nishapour. Now first completely done into English verse from the Persian, in accordance with the original forms, with a biographical and critical introduction by John Payne. London, "Printed for the Villon Society by private subscription and for private circulation only", 1898. - Summary by Algy Pug

By: Osborn H. Oldroyd (1842-1930)

Book cover The Poets' Lincoln Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President

By: Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde The Fisherman and His Soul

”The Fisherman and his Soul” is a fairy tale first published in November of 1891 in Wilde’s “A House of Pomegranates”. It tells of a fisherman who nets and falls in love with a mermaid. But to be with her he must shed his soul, which goes off to have adventures of its own. Will forbidden love endure?

Book cover Fuite de la Lune

While at Trinity Collage, Wilde obtained a reputation for clever repartee and keen wit. He affected a superior air in his manners which irritated his fellow undergraduates, so that he once became the object of their practical joking. While at Oxford Wilde made his first essay in public as a writer by contributing several poems to Dublin magazines. - Temple Scott from the Introduction to Poems by Oscar Wilde

By: Otto Leland Bohanan (1895-1932)

Book cover Dawn’s Awake!

volunteers bring you 14 recordings of The Dawn’s Awake! by Otto Leland Bohanan. This was the Weekly Poetry project for February 9, 2020. ------ Otto Leland Bohanan was born around 1895 In Washington, D.C. He graduated from Howard University and taught English at the Catholic University. He also worked as a music instructor at DeWitt Clinton High School and died in 1932. This poem taken from James Weldon Johnson, ed. . The Book of American Negro Poetry. 1922. - Summary by David Lawrence

By: Owen Meredith (1831-1891)

Book cover Lucile

By: Owen Seaman (1861-1936)

Book cover The Battle of the Bays

By: Palmer Cox (1840-1924)

Book cover Another Brownie Book

Brownies, like fairies and goblins, are imaginary little sprites, who are supposed to delight in harmless pranks and helpful deeds. They work and sport while weary households sleep, and never allow themselves to be seen by mortal eyes. Summary by Palmer Cox

By: Patrick Brontë (1777-1861)

Book cover Cottage Poems

By: Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

Book cover Poet and The Baby

What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar's poetry was what had already struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They had felt, as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature.

Book cover Voice Of The Banjo

volunteers bring you 18 recordings of The Voice Of The Banjo by Paul Laurence Dunbar. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for November 3, 2019. ------ What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar's poetry was what had already struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They had felt, as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature...

Book cover Candle-Lightin' Time

Poetry about African American Southern life - Summary by Denise Ray

By: Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

Book cover Poems of Paul Verlaine

By: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Book cover Shelley: Selected Poems and Prose

The English Romantic Period in literature featured a towering group of excellent poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. If we add in forerunners Burns and Blake, we have perhaps an unmatchable collection of writers for any era. Of these, Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the brightest and best, coupling a giant intellect with a highly emotional and impetuous nature. He was always a champion of liberty, but was largely ignored when he tried to promote political and social reform. He...

The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley The Masque of Anarchy

The Masque of Anarchy was Shelley's response to the Peterloo massacre at St Peter's Fields, Manchester, where 18 died and hundreds were injured, after Hussars charged into a rally for parliamentary reform. Written in Italy in 1819, the poem was not published until 1832, ten years after Shelley's death. This reading is from the first published edition with the addition of three words that were inserted in full only in later additions ('Eldon' in Stanza IV and 'Bible' and 'Sidmouth' in Stanza VI). The poem is preceded by Leigh Hunt's preface to the 1932 edition and followed by Harry Buxton Forman's 1887 lecture on the poem to the Shelley Society.

Book cover A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays
Book cover The Daemon of the World
Book cover The Witch of Atlas
Book cover Peter Bell the Third
Book cover To A Skylark

LibriVox volunteers bring you eight recordings of "To A Skylark." This is the Fortnightly Poetry for August 8, 2014.To A Skylark was completed by Shelley in late June 1820. It was inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley, and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon.

By: Philip Max Raskin (1880-1944)

Book cover Love and Longing

Philip Max Raskin was a Jewish poet about whose life not much can be found today. His poetry, however, lives on, and some poems are still well-known today. This volume contains a series of love-poems, sometimes conveying hope and happiness, sometimes longing and disappointment. - Summary by Carolin

By: Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Book cover A Defence of Poesie and Poems

By: Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

Book cover Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American to publish a book of poetry in 1773. Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at age seven, and bought by a wealthy Massachusetts family who taught her to read and write. Her extraordinary literary gifts led to the publication of her "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," and to her eventual emancipation by her owners. Although some of the poems demonstrate an apparent acceptance of the racist values of the white slave-owning classes (which viewed Africans as savage), Wheatley's considerable talents simultaneously contradicted these stereotypes.

Book cover To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works

volunteers bring you 14 recordings of To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works. This was the Weekly Poetry project for April 28, 2019. ------ The Authoress, Phillis Wheatley, was a Negro Servant To Mr. John Wheatley, Of Boston, In New-England. She was the first published African-American female poet, Wheatley was emancipated shortly after the publication of her book. - Summary by wikipedia

By: Plato (428-347)

The Symposium by Plato The Symposium

The Symposium (Ancient Greek: Συμπόσιον) is a philosophical book written by Plato sometime after 385 BCE. On one level the book deals with the genealogy, nature and purpose of love, on another level the book deals with the topic of knowledge, specifically how does one know what one knows. The topic of love is taken up in the form of a group of speeches, given by a group of men at a symposium or a wine drinking party at the house of the tragedian Agathon at Athens. Plato constructed the Symposium as a story within a story within a story...

By: Publius Ovidius Naso

Book cover Metamorphoses

The Metamorphoses of Ovid is probably one of the best known, certainly one of the most influential works of the Ancient world. It consists of a narrative poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world through mythological tales, starting with a cosmogony and finishing with the deification of Julius Caesar. Published around 8 AD, the Metamorphoses are a source, sometimes the only source, for many of the most famous ancient myths, such as the stories of Daedalus and Icarus, Arachne or Narcisus...

By: Publius Vergilius Maro (70 BC - 19 AD)

The Aeneid by Publius Vergilius Maro The Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic written by Virgil in the 1st century BC that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. The first six of the poem’s twelve books tell the story of Aeneas’ wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem’s second half treats the Trojans’ ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed. The poem was commissioned from Vergil by the Emperor Augustus to glorify Rome...

The Eclogues by Publius Vergilius Maro The Eclogues

This book of poems, written between 42 en 39 BC, was a bestseller in ancient Rome, and still holds a fascination today. Held to be divinely inspired not only by the Romans themselves, but by the Medieval Catholic church, The Eclogues is one of the most beloved collections of Latin short poetry.

By: Quintus H. H. Flaccus

Ars Poetica and Carmen Saeculare by Quintus H. H. Flaccus Ars Poetica and Carmen Saeculare

The Ars Poetica, by Horace, also known as Epistula ad Pisones, is a treatise on poetry written in the form of a letter, and published around 18 B.C. In it, Horace defines and exemplifies the nature, scope and correct way of writing poetry. This work, inspired by the book of the same name by Aristotle, is one of the most influential in Latin literature, and the source of famous concepts in poetics, such as “in medias res” and “ut pictura poesis”. The text itself is a poem in 476 dactilic hexameters...

By: R. C. Lehmann (1856-1929)

Book cover The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch

By: R. F. Murray (1863-1894)

Book cover Wasted Day

Robert Fuller Murray was a Victorian poet. Although born in the United States, Murray lived most of his life in the United Kingdom, most notably in St Andrews, Scotland. He wrote two books of poetry and was published occasionally in periodicals.

By: R. M.

Book cover Caw! Caw! Or, The Chronicle of Crows, A Tale of the Spring-time

By: Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali

Gitanjali is a collection of 103 poems in English, largely translations by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. This volume became very famous in the West, and was widely translated into other languages. In England a slender volume was published in 1913, with an exhilarating preface by W. B. Yeats. In the same year, Rabindranath became the first non-European to win the Nobel prize.

Book cover Stray Birds
Book cover First Jasmines

Rabindranath Tagore, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit...

Book cover The Fugitive

By: Rachel Annand Taylor (1876-1960)

Book cover The Hours of Fiammetta A Sonnet Sequence

By: Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943)

Book cover 'Twixt Earth and Stars

This is a volume of poetry by Radclyffe Hall. The poet and novelist led a highly scandalous lifestyle for the norms of her contemporary society, living openly lesbian in Germany and England. Some of the poems in this volume are also love poems to other women, a fact which was not generally known at the time the book was published. - Summary by Carolin

Book cover Sheaf of Verses

This is a volume of poetry by Radclyffe Hall. At the time of publication of this novel, Radclyffe Hall was living in Bad Homburg in Germany, in a lesbian relationship. Some of the poems in this volume are love poems, and to spare the public's delicate sensibilities, the names of the people to whom the poems were dedicated are removed. - Summary by Carolin

By: Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

Book cover Poems

A concise collection of poems translated from the great German poet Rilke into formal English verse. Although the translation may be freer than some modern texts, this selection, which spans early and later writings and includes a preface refreshingly focused on the poet's artistic development, provides a nice entrée into Rilke's world.

By: Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886)

Book cover The Babes in the Wood One of R. Caldecott's Picture Books
Book cover The Fox Jumps Over the Parson's Gate

By: Rebecca Ruter Springer (1832-1904)

Book cover Songs by the Sea

Best known for her mystical writing, IntraMuros, Rebecca Ruter Springer was also a sensitive poet. This a short volume of her poems celebrating the sea. - Summary by Larry Wilson

By: Richard Barnfield (1574-1627)

Book cover The Affectionate Shepherd

By: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)

Book cover Wife

volunteers bring you 22 recordings of A Wife, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. This was the Weekly Poetry project for June 13, 2021. ------ Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan was an Irish playwright and poet. In this little gem, he turns an intended insult on its head. - Summary by TriciaG

By: Richard Crashaw (c. 1613-1649)

Book cover Hymn of the Nativity, Sung by the Shepherds

Librivox volunteers bring you seven readings of A Hymn of the Nativity, Sung by the Shepherds by Richard Crashaw. This was the fortnightly poem for December 7 - December 21, 2014. - Ann Boulais

By: Richard D. Blackmore (1825-1900)

Book cover Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse

By: Richard Dennys (1884-1916)

Book cover Better Far to Pass Away

At this time of year, we dedicate the Fortnightly Poetry project to the fallen in war. This poem, written at a time when the average life expectancy of an officer at the front was a mere six weeks, vividly demonstrates a young officer's expectation and acceptance of his own death.

By: Richard Henry Stoddard (1825-1903)

Book cover Abraham Lincoln An Horatian Ode

By: Richard Hovey (1864-1900)

Book cover At the Club

LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of At the Club by Richard Hovey. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 3, 2013.Richard Hovey was an American poet. Graduating from Dartmouth College in 1885, he is known in part for penning the school Alma Mater, Men of Dartmouth. He collaborated with Canadian poet Bliss Carman on three volumes of "tramp" verse: Songs from Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia (1896), and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900), the last being published after Hovey's death.

By: Richard Hunter

Book cover More Dollies

By: Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947)

Book cover A Jongleur Strayed Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane

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