Poézia

Audiobook The Great Poets – John Keats. Naxos AudioBooks continues its new series of Great Poets – represented by a collection of their most popular poems – with John Keats. Although this man had a short life, he produced a series of outstanding poems – many of which appeared first in letters to his sister. He was largely unappreciated during his lifetime, and died in Rome at the age of 26.

Audiobook The Great Poets – Percy Bysshe Shelley. Idealist, atheist, outcast, political radical and, of course, poet – Percy Bysshe Shelley was, in many ways, the epitome of the Romantic artist. His poetry was an outlet for his passionately-held and highly unpopular beliefs; beliefs which resulted in social exclusion, exile, and possibly even his premature death at the age of twenty-nine.

Robert Browning’s popular poems The Pied Piper of Hamelin and How They Brought the Good News are often anthologised, but it is in his dramatic lyrics such as My Last Duchess and the chilling Porphyria’s Lover that his poetic genius shines. Browning, with his unusual use of language, can be a challenging poet, but one who is always rewarding.

Audiobook The Great Poets – Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in collaboration with his friend William Wordsworth, revolutionised English poetry; in 1798 they produced their Lyrical Ballads, poems of imagination and reflection using ‘the language of men’. They pointed the way forward for a generation of Romantic poets. Coleridge’s addiction to opium affected his poetic output, and yet the handful of poems he did produce were innovative.

Naxos AudioBooks continues its new series of Great Poets – represented by a collection of their most popular poems on one CD – with W. B. Yeats, one of the most loved poets of the twentieth century. He left a large legacy of outstanding poems, and the finest are collected here: Down by the Salley Gardens, The Lake Isle of Inisfree, The Secret Rose and He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

Audiobook The Great Poets – William Blake. Naxos AudioBooks begins its new series of Great Poets – represented by their most popular poems – with William Blake. This collection contains all of his most popular works – Tyger, the Auguries of Innocence, Jerusalem, as well as some lesser-known poetry that demonstrates the range and power of his verse.

"The last of the crew needs especial remark, Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea-but, that one being `Snark‘, The good Bellman engaged him at once. " `The Hunting of the Snark‘ (1876) is a nonsense poem by `Alice Adventures in Wonderland‘ author Lewis Carroll. It describes the disastrous hunting mission by a bizarre group of characters, among these a butcher who can only kill beavers and a guy who forgot his own name.

Audiobook The Inferno, written by Dante. ‘Abandon all hope you who enter here’ (Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’intrate) Dante’s Hell is one of the most remarkable visions in Western literature. An allegory for his and future ages, it is, at the same time, an account of terrifying realism. Passing under a lintel emblazoned with these frightening words, the poet is led down into the depths by Virgil and shown those doomed to suffer eternal torment for vices exhibited and sins committed on earth.

"The Lady of the Lake" (1810) is a narrative poem set in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, in the Trossach region of Scotland. It is made up of six cantos, each focusing on one day. There’s three main plots to this poem: a competition between three men for the love of one Ellen Douglas, a feud between James Douglas and King James V, and a war between lowland and highland Scots.

An ageing singer asks for shelter at Newark Castle, and in exchange performs for his hostess the Duchess of Buccleuch the story of a 16th century border feud. The story he tells is about the so-called "Flower of Teviot," the Lady Margaret Scott of Buccleuch, who the Baron Henry of Cranstown is in love with.