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.