Publisher: Charles River Editors
Lord Byron was an English poet and one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement. Despite having only lived to age 36, Lord Byron remains one of the greatest and most influential British poets. This version of Lord Byrons Don Juan includes a table of contents.
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for PoetryFinalist for the 2019 National Book AwardJericho Brown's daring book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.Show book
LibriVox volunteers bring you 20 recordings of Simplex Munditiis by Ben Jonson. This was the Weekly Poetry project for February 26, 2012.Ben Jonson was an English poet and playwright. He had a huge influence on both the theatre of his day and that which came after.Much of his poetry was inspired by the classical world of Ancient Greece and Rome. He also wrote a lot of satirical poetry on everyday topics, of which this poem is one such example. (Summary by Lucy Perry)Show book
“Part-epic, part-elegy” this collection presents “a wonderfully involuted tableau where ancient Greek myth . . . strip malls, and natural history swirl together” (Kenyon Review). In this intricately crafted poetry collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force—that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Moving from the mundane to the profound, these poems re-imagine things great and small, constantly reorienting our relationship to matter, science, mythology, our internal selves. With poems remarkable in their clarity and captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world. As we seek to put everything in its place, we must also negotiate the inexorable pull toward the places we call home—one we alternately try and fail to resist.Show book
LibriVox volunteers bring you 10 recordings of Momentous Words by Edward Rowland Sill. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of November 23rd, 2008.Show book
Rich in timeless wisdom and beautiful poetic language, this spiritual classic is “exquisite . . . simply a masterpiece” (The Independent, London). As the wise man Almustafa prepares to leave the island where he has lived in exile from his home for twelve years, the community gathers around him, beseeching him to share his wisdom before he departs. Within this framework, the beloved prophet offers meditations on love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death. Written by a Lebanese-American poet, The Prophet was an immediate success upon its publication in 1923. Translated into more than one hundred languages and selling millions of copies, the book’s popularity has never waned. In the 1960s, it was freshly discovered and venerated by the counterculture, and in 2014, it was adapted into an animated film. The universal truths embedded in these twenty-six prose poems continue to resonate for spiritual seekers. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.Show book
Carl Sandburg fixed his eyes on the people of his time and place. He ignored or scorned the wealthy, the comfortable, the complacent, the powerful and those who serve them; he had no time for the ruling class. His eyes were open to the immigrant, the laborer, the hobo, the farmer, the man who works with his hands, the woman who runs a family, or the soldier who goes to war for them. Not for him the Man of the Masses from a left-wing poster, ruddy and muscular; he knew the reality of the laborer - the bad food, the burden of disease, the crushed mind. He saw his people and he saw them plain.He saw them against the background of war. World War I was taking the sons of his people and sending them across an ocean to fight - for what? He ends his book with a vivid vision of the Four Brothers - America, England, France and Russia - marching heroically against the Kaiser, but he gets there only after unflinchingly fixing his eyes upon the horrors of war, the trench running with blood, the mutilated soldier gasping for water.He saw them against an economy that pitted the have-nots against the haves, a government rife with corruption, a society built to look the other way.Most of all, he saw them part of a world that is fundamentally a world of beauty, a world that could have humanity as part of that beauty, if only humankind could find its way back to its own nature. Enjoy his unique voice, his special vision, his gift for the natural language of his time and place, and his skill with that language. (A note to the listener: this book was written in 1918 and uses the common language of that time. That includes frequent instances of the use of words referring to African-Americans and people of Central European ancestry that are today unacceptable. We do well to listen to the way even our great poets once spoke, so that we do not forget that we once spoke that way.)Show book
