Poetry audiobooks

When a modern film script draws inspiration from a poem written more than a century ago, readers can judge its impact on our collective imagination. Such is the resonance of the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe.

First published in 1845, "The Raven" is a masterpiece of atmosphere, rhythmic quality and use of language. Constructed in narrative form, it tells the story of a young man who is mourning the loss of his beloved. One December night as he wearily sits up browsing through a classical volume, a mysterious tapping against his window disturbs him. When he opens it to investigate, a strange and mournful raven enters his room and perches on the bust of a Greek goddess ins...

When a modern film script draws inspiration from a poem written more than a century ago, readers can judge its impact on our collective imagination. Such is the resonance of the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe.

First published in 1845, "The Raven" is a masterpiece of atmosphere, rhythmic quality and use of language. Constructed in narrative form, it tells the story of a young man who is mourning the loss of his beloved. One December night as he wearily sits up browsing through a classical volume, a mysterious tapping against his window disturbs him. When he opens it to investigate, a strange and mournful raven enters his room and perches on the bust of a Greek goddess ins...

The Tang Dynasty (618 to 907) was a golden age of Chinese culture: religion and philosophy, painting and calligraphy, sculpture, architecture and music all reached peaks of perfection. Poetry was the epitome of the arts: a scholastic requirement, a route to fame, a moulder of character. Nearly 50,000 poems of the Tang have survived. The collection ‘Three Hundred Tang Poems’ was compiled around 1763. It comprises six volumes, with poems grouped by verse form. Volume 1 covers the ‘ancient verse’ style in five-character lines (poems 1 to 35), and ‘folk song style verse’ (36 to 45). The masters Li Bai, Du Fu and Wang Wei are well represented here.

Recordings in this volume are in C...

Cædmon was an Anglo-Saxon herdsman attached to the double monastery of Streonæshalch (657–681). Originally ignorant of the art of song, Cædmon learned to compose one night in the course of a dream. Cædmon’s only known surviving work is Cædmon’s Hymn, the nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of the Christian god he supposedly learned to sing in his initial dream. The poem is one of the earliest attested examples of Old English and is one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the earliest recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language.

Magnificent in its scale and scope, this monumental poem by the blind poet John Milton was the first epic conceived in the English language. It describes an omniscient, all powerful God, the Fall of Man, the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, the disgraced angel who later becomes known as Satan, the Angelic Wars fought by Archangels Michael and Raphael and the Son of God who is the real hero of this saga.

The poet John Milton was more than sixty years old when he embarked on this immense work of literary creation. His father was a wealthy merchant who had embraced Protestantism despite opposition from his Catholic family. Milton grew up in a privileged environment, having bee...

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. Traditionally, the authorship of the Mahabharata is attributed to Vyasa. With more than 74,000 verses, Mahabharata is said to be the longest poem. Mahabharata tells the story of the epic Kurukshetra War and the fates of the cousin brothers Kauravas and the Pandavas. But more than that the Mahabharata contains much philosophical and devotional material, such as a discussion of the four "goals of life" or 'purusharthas'. The latter are enumerated as dharma (right action), artha (purpose), kama (pleasure), and moksha (liberation). (Introduction by om123)

Best known for his scary tales, mystery and detective stories and imaginative fantasy stories, Edgar Allan Poe was also a gifted poet. He wrote more than 70 poems and almost all of them have been widely appreciated by readers and critics alike.

This collection contains some of his most famous ones, including the immortal Raven, which combines a sense of doom and nameless despair. With its ringing, alliterative and repetitive lines and strange, supernatural atmosphere, it remains one of Poe's best known and most quoted poems.

Other poems in the anthology include The Bells, which was published after Poe's death. This poem is one of his most “acoustic” poems. It...

This collection includes 40 different Christmas carols collected and read by Douglas D. Anderson, the creator of The Hymns and Carols of Christmas website, a public-domain collection of Christmas music containing over 2,600 hymns, carols and songs.

George Herbert was a country minister, and a protégé of the great metaphysical poet John Donne. In The Temple, Herbert combines these two aspects of his training in one of the greatest cycles of religious poetry ever written. This is reading of a selection of these poems.

“Good fences make good neighbors...” If, as a reader, this is one line you do remember, then the poet Robert Frost would have fulfilled his purpose. The highest goal of a poet, he claimed, was to “lodge a few poems where they would be hard to get rid of...”

Unforgettable lines and indelible memories are connected with our encounters with America's best-loved and most popular poet. His wonderful pictures of rural life and the deeply philosophical insights they offer remain with us long after many others have faded.

Selected Poems by Robert Frost is a collection of eight poems, long and short, which provide a glimpse of his magnificent body of wo...