This is a collection of 20 stories and/or poems, contributed by volunteers, pertaining to dreams. - Summary by Michele Fry

This is a collection of 37 poems read in English by volunteers for May 2022.

This is a collection of 31 poems read in English by volunteers for June 2022.

Nine poems by American poets on the theme of Winter - Summary by Alan Mapstone

This is a collection of 47 poems read in English by volunteers for July 2022.

This is a collection of 38 poems read in English by volunteers for August 2022.

This is a collection of 42 poems read in English by volunteers for September 2022.

This is a collection of 45 poems read in English by volunteers for October 2022.

This is a collection of 37 poems read in English by volunteers for November 2022.

Victor James William Patrick Daley was an Australian poet. He was born in Ireland, and was educated at the Christian Brothers at Devonport in England. He arrived in Australia in 1878, and became a freelance journalist and writer in both Melbourne and Sydney. He is notable for becoming the first author in Australia who tried to earn a living from writing alone. In Sydney in 1898, he founded the bohemian Dawn and Dusk Club, which had many notable members such as writer Henry Lawson. He died at Sydney of tuberculosis...

volunteers bring you 10 recordings of The Vale to You, To Me the Heights by Victor Hugo. This was the Weekly Poetry project for November 28, 2021. ------ Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame , 1831. In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles . - Summary by Wikipedia

This is a volume of poetry by notable American horror story author Vincent O'Sullivan. These poems are as dark as most of his other writings, and are best enjoyed by those who are not faint of heart. - Summary by Carolin

This is a collection of poems by Violet Fane, pseudonym of Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie. The poems convey a lot of emotion, feeling, and sympathy. - Summary by Carolin

volunteers bring you 17 recordings of Unity by Violet Jacob. This was the Weekly Poetry project for February 27, 2022. ----- Violet Jacob was a Scottish writer known especially for her historical novel Flemington and for her poetry, mainly in Scots. She was described by a fellow Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid as "the most considerable of contemporary vernacular poets". he wrote most of her poetry in the 'Angus' dialect.

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems. She helped create her own gardens in Sissinghurst, Kent, which provide the backdrop to Sissinghurst Castle. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf. Poems of West and East is a short collection of her early work, which was published in 1917. (Summary by Wikipedia and Elizabeth Klett)

Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American anarchist. She was skilled in many subjects and wrote essays, poems, letters, sketches, stories and speeches. These are her selected poems.

The Bab Ballads are a collection of light verse by W. S. Gilbert, illustrated with his own comic drawings. Gilbert wrote the Ballads before he became famous for his comic opera librettos with Arthur Sullivan. In writing the Bab Ballads, Gilbert developed his unique “topsy-turvy” style, where the humour was derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. The Ballads also reveal Gilbert’s cynical and satirical approach to humour. They became famous on their own, as well as being a source for plot elements, characters and songs that Gilbert would recycle in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas...

This is a subset of the first twelve poems from the second collection of Gilbert’s “Bab Ballads” – light verses poking fun at the life and people of his time in Gilbert’s unique “topsy-turvey” style. The epitaph on his memorial on the Victoria Embankment in London is “HIS FOE WAS FOLLY AND HIS WEAPON WIT”, an epitaph amply exemplified in these verses.

volunteers bring you 21 recordings of The Magnet and The Churn by W. S. Gilbert. This was the Weekly Poetry project for April 26, 2020. ------ A bit of frivolity in these trying times. This Weekly Poem is taken from Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs by W. S. Gilbert. - Summary by David Lawrence

A collection of Wallace Stevens poems written before 1923. Stevens trained to be a lawyer. Within eleven years after this series of poems were written, he was vice-president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. He continued to pursue a quiet life of poetry and correspondence and for the remainder of his life he nurtured his contemplative habit of observation and writing as he walked from home to work and back again. Few at Hartford knew of his world acclaim as a poet. While...

Nearly 160 years after it was first published, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass continues to inspire, enthrall and educate generations of readers. This collection of poems serves as a vehicle for Whitman's philosophy, ideals, love of nature and mystical musings and it subsequently became one of the corner stones of American literature. Whitman was inspired to write Leaves of Grass based on Ralph Waldo Emerson's clarion call for a truly American poet who would tell of its glories, virtues and vices...

Specimen Days is essentially the great American poet Walt Whitman’s scrap book. It documents most of his life’s adventures, espeically his experience serving as a nurse during the Civil War and travelling around America.

This Weekly Poem is an excerpt from Song of the Broad-axe (4th Stanza) by Walt Whitman, who was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse.

LibriVox readers bring you 16 readings of Hush'd Be the Camps Today by Walt Whitman, in honor of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865. This was the weekly poem for April 12, 2015, to April 18, 2015.

Whitman claimed that after years of competing for "the usual rewards", he determined to become a poet. He first experimented with a variety of popular literary genres which appealed to the cultural tastes of the period. As early as 1850, he began writing what would become Leaves of Grass, a collection of poetry which he would continue editing and revising until his death. Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and used free verse with a cadence based on the Bible. At the end of June 1855, Whitman surprised his brothers with the already-printed first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman paid for the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass himself.

volunteers bring you 15 recordings of Long I Thought that Knowledge by Walt Whitman. This was the Weekly Poetry project for June 30, 2019. ------ This poem is taken from Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass"

volunteers bring you 14 recordings of Song of Myself, Section 51 by Walt Whitman. This was the Weekly Poetry project for February 20, 2022. ------ The final form of Song of Myself contains 52 sections, the work remains among the most acclaimed and influential in American poetry. In 2011, writer and academic Jay Parini named it the greatest American poem ever written. - Summary by Wikipedia

“Baby’s Own Aesop” presents the fables as one-stanza limericks, each “pictorially pointed” by Walter Crane, the noted painter and illustrator. He apprenticed to master wood-engraver, William James Linton, who furnished the draft of the book’s poems for Crane to edit.

Ophelia, poem of the week for February 25, 2007; read here by twelve of our readers. Ophelia loved Hamlet, was repulsed by him, and went insane. She drowned in a stream, gathering flowers of remembrance. This is one of a number of poems that de la Mare wrote about Shakespeare characters.

This year's Hollowe'en offering is an eerie tale by Walter de La Mare.

These wonderful, whimsical poems from the incomparable Walter de la Mare describe the bliss of childhood, explore the marvel of a child's imagination and portray the intriguing landscapes of existences both lived and imagined by a young mind in a magical kingdom located somewhere between daydream and caprice. In these poems we experience aspects of a reality unencumbered by concern, unhindered by anxiety, and share an imagination free to wander, ponder, contemplate, envision and express itself in a marvelous mosaic of impression, inspiration and introspection...

LibriVox readers bring you 13 versions of The Poet Who Sleeps by Walter Savage Landor. This was the weekly poetry project for December 1, 2013.

volunteers bring you 11 recordings of The Maid's Lament by Walter Savage Landor. This was the Weekly Poetry project for August 25, 2109. ------ Walter Savage Landor was an English writer, poet, and activist. The critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity. As remarkable as his work was, it was equaled by his rumbustious character and lively temperament. - Summary by Wikipedia

volunteers bring you 17 recordings of One Lovely Name by Walter Savage Landor. This was the Weekly Poetry project for July 26, 2020.------- Walter Savage Landor was an English writer, poet, and activist. Today he is best known for his collection of Imaginary Conversations between historical celebrities and his pithy aphoristic verses. - Summary by Algy Pug

An alphabet of historical characters presented in poetical form!In their original form, the contents of this book appeared in the Chicago Sunday Tribune, which newspaper is hereby thanked for the privilege of reproducing this Alphabet

Nothing seems to be known about Mr and Mrs William Platt, the writers of Stories of the Scottish Border. What they produced is an eccentric guidebook and history, seen partly through the ballads of the region. The book recounts the military stratagems, treachery and courage of those who struggled for control of the Border lands and of the whole country, and tells of the triumphs or tragic fate of those who took part on both sides. It also tells us stories of the Border Reivers, raiders who lived by riding out and stealing their neighbours’ livestock...

William Allingham was an Irish poet, diarist and editor, who wrote several volumes of lyric verse.

Popular for his simple, delicate poetry for children, this Irishman wrote these verses for his three children, Gerald, Eva and Henry, and others like them. Typically, they touch on fairies and nature.

Librivox volunteers bring you eight readings of End of Harvest, by William Bell Scott. This is the fortnightly poetry project for November 9, 2014.

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright/In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” These often quoted lines are part of The Tiger in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. In 1789, William Blake released a limited edition of the book. Being a gifted artist, poet and printmaker, he undertook to personally publish all his work himself through a very painstaking but highly artistic process of etching, thereby transferring his drawings and poems individually onto copper plates by hand...

Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul are two books of poetry by the English poet and painter, William Blake. Although Songs of Innocence was first published by itself in 1789, it is believed that Songs of Experience has always been published in conjunction with Innocence since its completion in 1794. Songs of Innocence mainly consists of poems describing the innocence and joy of the natural world, advocating free love and a closer relationship with God, and most famously including Blake’s poem The Lamb...

The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English poet William Blake, illustrated by Blake’s own plates. It was originally published as The First Book of Urizen in 1794. Later editions dropped the word “first”. The book takes its name from the character Urizen in Blake’s mythology, who represents alienated reason as the source of oppression. The book describes Urizen as the “primeaval priest”, and describes how he became separated from the other Eternals to create his own alienated and enslaving realm of religious dogma...

Milton: a Poem is an epic poem by William Blake, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810. Its hero is John Milton, who returns from heaven and unites with Blake to explore the relationship between living writers and their predecessors. While on earth, Milton also unites with his feminine aspect, Ololon. The poem describes progress toward the apocalyptic union of living and dead, internal and external reality, and male and female. .

The epic poem Jerusalem was in Blake's own opinion his masterpiece. It is the last of the great prophetic books. Originally produced as an engraved book of 100 pages (only one copy of which was every fully finished in the colouring), the poem develops and unifies many of the themes Blake had been exploring in earlier works. It is a complex and powerful work, full of dramatic imagery and sublime poetry. You might think of it like a poetic version of a Wagner opera. This is poetry as if your life depended on it...

The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical foment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution. The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work Heaven and Hell published in Latin 33 years earlier. Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake several places in the Marriage. Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral structures and his Manichean view of good...

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."The Marriage of Heaven & Hell is William Blake’s masterpiece – a piously blasphemous reimagining of the duality of good and evil as an eternal dance of equally essential polarities.Good, in Blake’s complex cosmology, is defined by a blind deference to the external, rational order embodied by the tyrant and the priest. Evil is the chaotic and revolutionary impulse that defies all reason and authority.While Blake’s sympathies are clearly with the Romantic revolutionary, he argues for the necessity of both sides, which create balance through their eternal opposition.

This narrative poem is composed in three parts, and consists of a dialogue between the aged Irish hero Oisín and St. Patrick. Oisín relates his three-hundred year sojourn in the immortal isles of Faerie. In the isles, Oisín married the beautiful Sidhe Niamh: together they traveled, feasted, and quested. At last Oisín succumbs to the temptation to return and visit the lands of mortal men: inadvertently slipping from his faerie horse, his body touches the ground and instantly puts on the flesh of a decrepit old man. Oisín describes various islands and what he did there: contrasting his noble deeds with the degenerate weakness of the present generation.

The Wild Swans at Coole is a collection of poems by William Butler Yeats, first published in 1917. It is also the name of a poem in that collection. The Wild Swans at Coole is in the "middle stage" of Yeats' writing and is concerned with, amongst other themes, Irish nationalism and the creation of an Irish aesthetic.

The first collection by Irish-born poet William Butler Yeats. Many decades before his mysterious and austere Modernist verse earned him a nobel prize, Yeats achieved renown as one of the last major poets in the High Romantic tradition. These poems showcase his Celtic imagination, his love for Irish folk-tales, and his commitment to the Romantic ideal of love.

In the Seven Woods (1904) is Yeats's first twentieth-century poetry collection. Its fourteen poems show him moving steadily away from the decisively Romantic diction of his earlier work. Here we hear a poetic voice that is at once more individual, colloquial and dramatic than previously. In addition, several poems sound a note of bitter lamentation over the marriage in 1903 of Maud Gonne, Yeats's great love and muse, to John MacBride.

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, his earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Williams spent his life as a doctor practicing pediatric medicine in northern New Jersey, a few miles west of New York City. During the work day, between seeing patients, he often dashed off poems on the backs of blank prescription pads that he kept in his pocket. This particular poem was written in just such a spontaneous way, after seeing the Russian Ballet perform in Manhattan. Each of the 16 readers in this collection took the challenge to make the same kind of leap – reading it spontaneously.

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson. His father was an English immigrant, and his mother was born in Puerto Rico. He attended public school in Rutherford until 1897, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City. Then, in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams befriended Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (best known as H...

volunteers bring you 14 recordings of To The Duchesse of Newcastle, On Her New Blazing-World by William Cavendish. This was the Weekly Poetry project for November 11, 2018. ------ Margaret Cavendish's book, "Blazing World" is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world that can be reached via the North Pole. It is "the only known work of utopian fiction by a woman in the 17th century, as well as an example of what we now call 'proto-science fiction'. The book inspired this notable sonnet by her husband, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which celebrates her imaginative powers, and was included in her book. ~ Summary from Wikipedia

“To bury these, to christen those, And marry such fond folks who chose To change the tenor of their life And risk the matrimonial strife.” This was the humdrum life of Dr. Syntax before he set out on his bizarre and hilarious adventures, presented here in the form of satirical poem in 26 cantos. It’s a lot of fun!

William Cowper was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. His religious sentiment and association with John Newton (who wrote the hymn "Amazing Grace") led to much of the poetry for which he is best remembered. His poem "Light Shining out of Darkness" gave English the phrase: "God moves in a mysterious way/His wonders to perform." Wikipedia

volunteers bring you 18 recordings of Inscription For A Stone by William Cowper. This was the Weekly Poetry project for May 12, 2019. ------ INSCRIPTION FOR A STONE Erected at the sowing of a grove of oaks at Chillington, the Seat of T. Giffard, Esq, 1790

volunteers bring you 8 recordings of The Negro's Complaint by William Cowper. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for February 9, 2020. ------ Cowper, an English poet, wrote a poem called "The Negro's Complaint" which rapidly became very famous, and was often quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. during the 20th century civil rights movement. - Summary by Wikipedia

LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of The Journey of Life by William Cullen Bryant. This was the Weekly Poetry project for December 23, 2012.William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. His poetry has been described as being "of a thoughtful, meditative character, and makes but slight appeal to the mass of readers." (

LibriVox volunteers bring you 14 recordings of Midsummer by William Cullen Bryant. This was the Weekly Poetry project for June 23, 2013.This poem taken from the Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant, Household Edition.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 11 recordings of A Song For New Year's Eve by William Cullen Bryant. This was the Weekly Poetry project for December 30, 2012.William Cullen Bran was an American Romantic poet. He wrote this poem in 1859. We are recording it to celebrate the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013.

William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. He is also remembered as one of the principal authorities on homeopathy and as a hymnist for the Unitarian Church, both legacies of his father's enormous influence on him. - Summary by Wikipedia

volunteers bring you 16 recordings of Hope by William Dean Howells. This was the Weekly Poetry project for July 7, 2019. ------ A short, vivid seafaring poem that holds out hope for an afterlife, wonderfully crafted by William Dean Howells, an American novelist, literary critic, poet and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as well as for his own prolific writings

Twenty-six stories of first nations' origin rendered in English in verse. The author's dedication claims the stories "help us to understand that the white man and red man are brothers." His Ojibway name was Nwah-ke-nah-go-zid. The content and tone of the poems are distinctly indigenous. An extensive bibliography provides the sources for the stories.

A semi-autobiographical poem in three cantos recounts the wreck of the merchant ship Britannia. Written by William Falconer, a seaman of some experience, who survived one shipwreck himself with only two others of the 50 man crew and eventually perished in the loss of a second ship, the frigate Aurora, 20 years later. The poem is recognized for its realistic portrayal of life aboard an 18th century sailing vessel. - Summary by Fritz

Liber Amoris is unlike anything Hazlitt wrote and probably like nothing you've come across before. On the face of it it tells the story of Hazlitt's infatuation with his landlords daughter. Hazlitt was middle aged and she young and pretty, a bit of a coquette from the sound of it. It turned out badly for Hazlitt and the book tells the story of this doomed love. Critics have always been divided about the merit of the piece. Even those who see its merit often feel more comfortable with his polished literary works, and perhaps rightly so...

W. H. Davies was a Welsh poet and writer. Davies spent a significant part of his life in the United Kingdom and United States, becoming one of the most popular poets of his time. Davies is usually considered one of the Georgian poets, although much of his work is atypical of the style and themes adopted by others of the genre.

William Henry Rhodes will long be remembered by his contemporaries at the Bar of California as a man of rare genius, exemplary habits, high honor, and gentle manners, with wit and humor unexcelled. His writings are illumined by powerful fancy, scientific knowledge, and a reasoning power which gave to his most weird imaginations the similitude of truth and the apparel of facts. W.H.L.B.

LibriVox volunteers bring you 12 recordings of The Flag and the Faithful by William J. Lampton. This was the Weekly Poetry project for January 20, 2013.William J. Lampton was the second cousin of Jane Clemens (the youngest of the three daughters of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain.)He launched his jounalist carreer in 1877 by starting the Ashland (Kentucky) Weekly Review, with his father’s money. Lampton wrote several book, as well as humorous poems he called 'yawps'. These were printed in the New York Sun and published in Yawps and Other Things ca. 1900.

William Lisle Bowles was an English priest, poet and critic. The Wainsbeck is a sequestered river in Northumberland, having on its banks "Our Lady's Chapel," three-quarters of a mile west of Bothal. It has been commemorated by Akenside.

Good people all, of every degree,I pray, ye all be warned by me:I advise ye all to pause and think,And never more to taste strong drink. Some people do say it is good when taken in moderation,But, when taken to excess, it leads to tribulation,Also to starvation and loss of reputation,Likewise your eternal soul’s damnation. McGonagall has been widely acclaimed as the worst poet in British history. He campaigned vigorously against excessive drinking, appearing in pubs and bars to give edifying poems and speeches...

LibriVox volunteers bring you 16 recordings of Love is enough by William Morris. This was the Weekly Poetry project for February 17, 2013.William Morris was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and libertarian socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and English Arts and Crafts Movement. He was instumental in establishing the modern fanasty genre, and thus influenced writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien. Morris also wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts.

As well as being influential in the Arts and Crafts Movement and writing numerous poems and novels, William Morris was deeply involved in political reform. These poems, the earliest of which were first collected in 1885, reflect his socialist beliefs.

volunteers bring you 16 recordings of "Summer Dawn" by William Morris. This was the Weekly Poetry project for July 10, 2022. ------ When this poem was first published in 1856 it had no title. Subsequently, the 1858 edition gave the sonnet its title of "Summer Dawn." And it is a sonnet, though it does not follow traditional English or Italian models. Perhaps Morris was giving hint of the Provençal 'alba.' These poems in their early form were conversations between two lovers. The requirement is that each stanza end with the word 'alba' [dawn]. Morris ends lines five and eleven this way. - Summary by KevinS

volunteers bring you 17 recordings of The Song of the Waters by William Murray Graydon. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for January 2, 2022. ----- William Murray Graydon, February 4, 1864 – April 5, 1946, was an extremely prolific American writer who also wrote under the pen-names Alfred Armitage, William Murray, and Tom Olliver. He published a wide variety of historical fiction, wilderness and adventure stories and poems, science-fiction, and Sexton Blake boy detective stories. This lovely poem describes what the poet seems to hear the Susquehanna river whispering as it flows by his campsite on a star-lit night...

The order of the poems has been arranged according to age from first through eight grade. The collection of poems in part 1 begins with the simplest nursery rhymes. Grade II begins with The Sleepy Song by Josephine D. Bacon, Grade III begins with Willie Winkle by William Miller. Grade IV begins with John Gilpin by William Cowper. Grades V - VIII are contained in part 2. - Summary by Linette G

The order of the poems have been arranged according to age from first through eight grade. Grades I – IV are contained in part 1. This collection of poems in part 2 begins with Grade V and Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Grade VI begins with The Barefoot Boy by John G. Whittier. Grade VII begins with Ye Mariners of England by Thomas Campbell. Grade VIII begins with The Rhodora, On Being Asked, "Whence is the Flower" by Ralph W. Emerson. - Summary by Linette G

For Mother’s Day 2006, we’ve recorded five versions of this tribute to Mothers and their role in shaping the future. The title is very famous out of its context, but now you can hear how it was originally intended.

The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, later the publisher of Shakespeare’s First Folio. The first edition survives only in a single fragmentary copy; its date cannot be fixed with certainty since its title page is missing, though many scholars judge it likely to be from 1599, the year the second edition appeared with the attribution to Shakespeare. This version of The Passionate Pilgrim, contains 15 romantic sonnets and short poems. The works contained, while disputed as to authorship are in this writer’s most humble opinion, among the best of the age.

A selection of Shakespeare’s poems from The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. Lucrece draws on the story described in both Ovid's Fasti and Livy's history of Rome. In 509 BC, Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin, the king of Rome, raped Lucretia (Lucrece), wife of Collatinus, one of the king's aristocratic retainers. As a result, Lucrece committed suicide. Her body was paraded in the Roman Forum by the king's nephew. This incited a full-scale revolt against the Tarquins led by Lucius Junius Brutus, the banishment of the royal family, and the founding of the Roman republic.

Venus and Adonis is Shakespeare's narrative poem about the love of the goddess Venus for the mortal youth Adonis, dedicated partly to his patron, the Earl of Southampton (thought by some to be the beautiful youth to which many of the Sonnets are addressed). The poem recounts Venus' attempts to woo Adonis, their passionate coupling, and Adonis' rejection of the goddess, to which she responds with jealousy, with tragic results. This recording features three different readers performing the narration, Venus, and Adonis.

This is a volume of ghost stories in verse by William Theodore Parkes. The poems in this volume are often humorous, and written in a parody of ye olde style of poetry."Dealing largely with ghosts and legends embracing a dash of diablerie such as would have been dear to the heart of Ingoldsby. There is a rugged force in 'The Girl of Castlebar' that will always make it tell in recitation; and even greater success in this direction has attended 'The Fairy Queen,' a story unveiling the seamy side, with quaint humour and stern realism...

William Vaughn Moody was an American dramatist and poet. Author of The Great Divide, first presented under the title of The Sabine Woman at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago on April 12, 1906. Moody's poetic dramas included The Masque of Judgment (1900), The Fire Bringer (1904), and The Death of Eve (left undone at his death). He taught English at Harvard and Radcliffe until 1895, when he went to Chicago where he was an instructor at the University of Chicago, and from 1901 to 1907 assistant professor of English and rhetoric.

William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian author and poet. Some of his poems are among the most famous Canadian poems of all time, and many contemporary Canadians interested in poetry may be familiar with one or two of his poems. The rest of his work is not very well-known today - a pitiful oversight. This collection contains 36 of his poems, and may serve as a good reintroduction into Campbell's poetry. - Summary by Carolin

volunteers bring you 16 recordings of Indian Summer by William Wilfred Campbell. This was the Weekly Poetry project for October 3, 2021. ------ This wonderful poem by William Wilfred Campbell captures the essence of a Canadian Autumn - its sights, smells and sounds - and brings to life the beauty of a land displaying unsurpassed splendor while facing the inevitability of the first of many blankets of snow. - Summary by BruceK

A Collection of poems by the Canadian poet William Wilfred Campbell most of which describe the natural beauty of the Great Lakes region of Ontario. These poems reflect Campbell's deep love of Nature as God's Creation.

Among monuments of narrative poetry, The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, by William Wordsworth, occupies a unique place. Wordsworth published the first version of the poem in 1798, but continued to work on it for the rest of his life. The final version, which is the subject of this recording, was published posthumously in 1850, by Wordworth’s widow, Mary. The Prelude is the first major narrative poem in European literature which deals solely with the spiritual journey of the author. In this respect the only predecessor to which it can be compared in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is similarly a journey from personal confusion to certitude, from ignorance to realization...

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry. Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only four poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"...

The Excursion: Being a portion of The Recluse, a Poem is a long poem by Romantic poet William Wordsworth and was first published in 1814. It was intended to be the second part of The Recluse, an unfinished larger work that was also meant to include The Prelude, Wordsworth's other long poem, which was eventually published posthumously. The exact dates of its composition are unknown, but the first manuscript is generally dated as either September 1806 or December 1809. (Introduction by Wikipedia)

Located in a part of Cumbria that was once part of Lancashire, the River Duddon rises in the high fells of the Lake District and flows for 25 miles through varied scenery before disappearing into the sands between Millom and Barrow-in-Furness. Wordsworth’s series of sonnets, inspired by his walks along the river, were written over a period of years, but are arranged so as to follow its downward course from the fells to the sea. Part One of this reading consists of the 33 sonnets and postscript that were first published as a series in 1820...

In celebration of Saint David's Day 2016 ,.org presents multiple readings of Composed Among the Ruins of a Castle in North Wales by William Wordsworth. Embodying the melancholy of the uniquely welsh word "hiraeth", which roughly translates as a sense of longing for a place that can never be returned to or that never was, this poem is a fitting tribute to the celebration of the patron saint of Wales Summary by Charlotte Duckett

This poem is part of the "Ecclesiastical Sonnets," writen by Wordsworth between 1821 - 22. - Summary by David Lawrence

volunteers bring you 11 recordings of Ode To Duty by William Wordsworth. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for May 31, 2020 ------ “Ode to Duty” is an appeal to the principle of morality for guidance and support. This Fortnightly Poem is taken from The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 3 by William Wordsworth - Summary by Wikipedia

This is a very impressive collection of some of the best sonnets from the pen of the incomparable William Wordsworth. The appreciation that Wordsworth had for the beauty of his surroundings is vibrantly exhibited in these selections, as are his feelings on love, friendship, society, conflict, history, the supernatural and indeed the art of poetry itself. And what better vehicle for the elegant articulation of a master poet's thoughts and inspirations than the sonnet, an art form ideally suited to assertion, verbalization and contemplation...

"Yone Noguchi was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. Critical evaluations of Noguchi, while varying drastically, have frequently stressed the enigmatic character of his work. Arthur Symons referred to him as a "scarcely to be apprehended personality." Arthur Ransome called him "a poet whose poems are so separate that a hundred of them do not suffice for his expression." Ezra Pound, on first reading The Pilgrimage in 1911 wrote that "His poems seem to be rather beautiful...

Published in 1918, Zora Cross’s book of poems, The Lilt of Life, was her third book of verse, and, like her earlier works, largely focused on her experiences of love, erotic entanglements , and motherhood. Many of the poems are written as an homage to her then-husband, David McKee Wright, whom she met while writing for The Bulletin, where Wright was her editor, causing a significant scandal in Sydney literary circles. - Summary by Elise Dee