Poetry audiobooks page 2

Hyakunin isshu (百人一首) is a traditional style of compiling Japanese waka poetry where each contributor writes one poem for the anthology.

A House of Pomegranates (1891) is a collection of fairy tales, written by Oscar Wilde, that was published as a second collection for The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). Wilde once said that this collection was "intended neither for the British child nor the British public."

The following is a recording of the first volume of poetry published by Edna St. Vincent Millay. When the author had graduated from high school, she couldn’t afford to go to college. In the summer of 1912, Vincent’s sister, Norma, found work as a waitress at a hotel near where they lived. One night, Norma insisted that Vincent attend a masquerade ball, given at the hotel, if only to get Vincent out of the house and to meet people. Vincent finally gave in, and while there, sang songs and recited “Renascence,” the first poem in this collection. This immediately won over the support of one “Miss Dow,” who would help Vincent raise enough money to attend Vassar College. From there, she woul...

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor for acts of ‘gross indecency’. During his time at Reading Gaol, he witnessed a rare hanging, and in the three years between his release and his untimely death in 1900, was inspired to write the following poem, a meditation on the death penalty and the importance of forgiveness, even for (and especially for) something as heinous as murdering one’s spouse; for even the murderer, Wilde argues, is human and suffers more so for being the cause of his own pain, for ‘having killed the thing he loved’; for everyone is the cause of someone else’s suffering and suffers at the hands of another. It is this that Jesus Christ could see; he ...

One of Dante's earliest works, La vita nuova or La vita nova (The New Life) is in a prosimetrum style, a combination of prose and verse, and tells the story of his youthful love for Beatrice. The prose creates the illusion of narrative continuity between the poems; it is Dante's way of reconstructing himself and his art in terms of his evolving sense of the limitations of courtly love (the system of ritualized love and art that Dante and his poet-friends inherited from the Provençal poets, the Sicilian poets of the court of Frederick II, and the Tuscan poets before them). Sometime in his twenties, Dante decided to try to write love poetry that was less centered on the self and more aimed ...

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.

Two hundred and twelve residents of a small town tell their stories without fear of recrimination or ridicule. The only difference is that they're all dead! The two hundred and forty-four poems that form the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters is really a series of epitaphs about the citizens of a fictional town called Spoon River and deals with the “plain and simple annals” of small town America.

Edgar Lee Masters grew up in a small town in Illinois. His father's financial problems forced the young Masters to abandon ideas of college and take up a job instead. Though he continued to study privately, he was compelled to work on a series of dull and uninspiring j...

Четири кратки творби от поетесата Мара Белчева (8 септември 1868, Севлиево – 16 март 1937, София), посветени на човешката близост и доверие. Изповедното начало, характерно за ранните стихове на поетесата, по-късно се свързва с размисъл върху вечните човешки въпроси. Поетесата изповядва християнските добродетели и се уповава на тях, мисълта за Бога става една от доминантите в творбите ѝ. Висока нравственост, спокойно мечтателно-носталгично любовно чувство, дирене на хармония в съществуването определят облика на творчеството ѝ.

Krasavitse, Kotoraya Niuhala Tabak (To a Beautiful woman, Who Was Smelling Tobacco)is a small poem written by Alexander Pushkin, a famous Russian poet well known outside the Russia. The author describes in a fun and artistc way the conflict between an image inside of his head of the beautiful and lovely women on the one hand, and her action – smelling tobacco – on the other hand! Can anyone imagine two more incompatible things than a clean and bright woman and a dirty toy of alcoholics and sailors – tobacco! This conflict hit the author straight into his heart, so he couldn’t ignore it and wrote this amazing poem upon such a revelational theme.

Published by the Religious Tract Society in London, The Verse-Book of a Homely Woman is a collection of domestic, spiritual, and fanciful poems from the point of view of a woman, a housewife, and a Christian. The natural, supernatural, and solidly mundane are mixed together as well as separated into two parts: Indoors and Outdoors.