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Spirits in Bondage is C.S. Lewis’s first book and the first of his works to be available in the public domain. It was released in 1919 under the pseudonym of Clive Hamilton and was written in a period of darker thought for C.S. Lewis than was later evidenced in his Christian apologist writings. The darkness of the verse is most evident in Part One (The Prison House), begins to change in the short transitional Part Two (Hesitation) and attains a more hopeful tone in the final Part Three (Escape). Yet a dreamy effect, influenced by Celtic and Druid mythology, persists throughout. Spirits in Bondage consists of forty poems that provide an intriguing insight into the youthful heart of C.S. Lewis and occasionally provides interesting lyrical foreshadowing of some of the landscapes portrayed in his famous Chronicles of Narnia series. (Summary by Robert Garrison)...

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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. (Summary by Caliban and Wikipedia)...

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The Battle of Marathon is a rhymed, dramatic, narrative-poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Written in 1820, it retells powerfully The Battle of Marathon: during which the Athenian state defeated the much larger invading force during the first Persian invasion of Greece. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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In honor of President’s Day, brings you thirteen versions of O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman. This classic poem was written by Whitman following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It appears in Leaves of Grass , Whitman’s masterpiece of a poetry collection and is considered by many to be one of his greatest poems. This was the Weekly Poetry Project for the week of February 19th, 2006. (Summary by Annie Coleman)...

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Helen Hunt Jackson is probably most famous for her work on behalf of Native Americans’ rights. However, this short volume presents a sonnet for each month of the year, devoted simply and beautifully to the shifting wonder of nature through the seasons. (Summary by Laura Fox)...

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A Boy's Will is Robert Frost's first full volume of poetry. Issued when Frost was approaching forty, it established his reputation and created a revolution in American poetry. With this publication, Frost became an established poet. He later became the major American poet of the twentieth century. A Boy's Will is characteristic of Frost's ability to conjure photographically clear physical images while ruminating on the complexities of the human condition, its frailties and strengths, and its temporal state, like that of his beloved New England landscape. (Summary by Becky Miller)...

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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. (Summary by Kasper Nijsen)...

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Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. Her long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again, becoming the only writer to do so, in 1933 with her Collected Poems. She helped create her own gardens in Sissinghurst, Kent, which provide the backdrop to Sissinghurst Castle. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf. Poems of West and East is a short collection of her early work, which was published in 1917. (Summary by Wikipedia and Elizabeth Klett)...

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A collection of poems by Wallace Stevens published before 1923. Trained as a lawyer, within eleven years after these poems were written he was a vice-president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. He continued to pursue a quiet life of poetry and correspondence and for the remainder of his life nurtured his contemplative habit of observation and writing as he walked from home to work and back again. Few at Hartford knew of his world acclaim as a poet. While his major work is considered to have been written when he was much older, many of these early poems are firm classics in the American poetic canon, including: Anecdote of the Jar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and others. Stevens died of cancer in 1955, not long after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. All poems and recordings are in the public domain. This collection was recorded for .org. (Summary by Alan Davis-Drake)...

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Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 – 1806) was an English poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility. It was in 1784, in debtor's prison with her husband Benjamin, that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets. The work achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels. Stuart Curran, the editor of Smith's poems, has written that Smith is the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic. She helped shape the patterns of thought and conventions of style for the period. Romantic poet William Wordsworth was the most affected by her works. He said of Smith in the 1830s that she was a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Smith was largely forgotten....

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Sir John Suckling (1609-42) was one of the Cavalier poets at the court of King Charles I of England. He took up arms in the conflicts of that era but was said to be more fit for the boudoir than the battlefield. He was a prolific lover, a sparkling wit and an excessive gamester and is credited with inventing the card game, Cribbage. Cavalier poetry was witty, decorous and sometimes naughty. The Constant Lover displays these elements as well as Suckling's conversational ease and charm....

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In stunning narrative poetry, the story begins during the time when Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick has been hunted out of Scotland into exile by the English and their allies. Bruce returns over sea from the Island of Rachrin: but is forced to land close to hostile forces at Artonish Castle on the seacoast of Argylshire. Seeking refuge from tempestuous seas, Bruce begs shelter from Ronald, Lord of the Isles: inadvertently on the day of his marriage feast to the beautiful Edith of Lorn. Bruce's very presence is enough to interrupt the nuptials and to break up the festivities: the guests quickly polarise into two armed and equally matched factions: one ready to raise Bruce to the Scottish crown, the other ready to slay him for desecration and murder. The combatants are dispersed with no bloodshed only by the combined offices of Lord Ronald himself, aided by a visiting Abbot: whereupon Bruce quickly removes himself to first the Island of Sky, and then Ayrshire: raising the an army willing to rout the English and re-establish Scottish independence. Bruce begins to win a steady stream of victories as his armies march inevitably towards Ban...

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Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552 – 29 October 1618) was an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularising tobacco in England. Raleigh's poetry is written in the relatively straightforward, unornamented mode known as the plain style. C. S. Lewis considered Raleigh one of the era's silver poets, a group of writers who resisted the Italian Renaissance influence of dense classical reference and elaborate poetic devices. In poems such as What is Our Life and The Lie, Raleigh expresses a contemptus mundi (contempt of the world) attitude more characteristic of the Middle Ages than of the dawning era of humanistic optimism. But, his lesser-known long poem The Ocean to Cynthia combines this vein with the more elaborate conceits associated with his contemporaries Edmund Spenser and John Donne, expressing a melancholy sense of history. A minor poem of Raleigh's captures the atmosphere of the court at the time of Queen Elizabeth I. His response to Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love was The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd. The Passionate Shepherd to His Love was writ...

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The Lays of Ancient Rome comprise four narrative poems comprised by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay: recalling popular episodes from Roman historical-legends that were strongly moral in tone: exemplifying Roman virtue against Latine perfidy. The four poems are: - Horatius - Horatius and two companions seek to hold back a large invading Etruscan force at the far end of a bridge over the Tiber River. The trio are willing to lay down their lives so as to prevent the Etruscans crossing and sacking the otherwise ill-defended Rome: it is a desperate gamble to buy enough time for the Romans to destroy the bridge in advance of the hostile army. But will their efforts succeed? - The Battle of Lake Regillus - The Romans take arms against the powerful Latine league headed by the expelled Tarquin nobles. The fighting is desperate and bloody: the event is decided only after the arrival upon the battlefield of the twin gods Castor and Pollux. - Virginia - Virginia is the daughter of Virginius - a poor, honest Roman farmer-citizen. In former years Virginius enlisted as a legionary and shed his blood to fight Rome's enemies: now Virginius - like oth...

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Mirza Ghalib, full name Mirza Asadullah Khan Beig, pen name ‘Ghalib’ (1797-1869) was a famous Urdu- and Persian-language poet of India. He is best known for his lyrical and spiritual ghazals. Ghazal is a form of poetry in couplets. In a ghazal, each couplet is self-contained and generally unconnected with the next. Ghalib was born in Agra, in northern India, and was raised by his uncle. Ghalib had no formal education, but was tutored in Persian by Muhammad Mu'azzam, a noted scholar of the time. It got married in 1810 to Umrao Begum, the niece of Nawab Ahmad Baksh Khan who was the ruler of Ferozepur and Loharu at that time. Ghalib was introduced to the elite circle of intellectuals and artists that surrounded the Indian royal family in Delhi because of his father in law. In 1821 he compiled his first collection of Urdu verse. Deewan e Ghalib, Nuskha e Hamida was Published in 1828. soon after the publication of his Urdu poetry collection Ghalib switched to writing entirely in Persian, also known as Farsi. In 1826, on the death of Ghalib's uncle, the British government began providing Ghalib and his family with a small pension for the ...

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Poetry

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This was the weekly poetry project for 14 May 2006. Spring’s flowers come and go all too quickly, but Wordsworth’s classic poem reminds us that their blessings last....

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Poetry

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The Vernal Equinox signals the time when the winter’s cold mantle begins to succumb to the warming influences of the oncoming spring. Fay Inchfawn (nee Elizabeth Rebecca Ward) took the springtime of 1920 as her inspiration for the bright promise of beauty and new life described in Early Spring. volunteers bring you eight different readings of this magical work to celebrate the Vernal Equinox. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of March 19, 2006. (Summary by Chip)...

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Poetry

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volunteers bring you ten different recordings of a poem in French: Épigramme, by François Maynard. This was the weekly poetry project for the week of July 9th, 2006. (Summary by Annie Coleman)...

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Poetry

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Augusto dos Anjos (1884-1914) é um dos mais originais poetas brasileiros, e também um dos mais populares. Sua obra consiste, porém, em apenas um livro. Eu foi publicado ainda em vida do autor; outros poemas, publicados em periódicos ou inéditos, foram coligidos após sua morte e acrescentados ao volume organizado pelo autor, renomeado então Eu e Outras Poesias. Aclamada pelo público e pela crítica, sua obra foi repudiada por muitos em sua época, e ainda causa estranheza, pela mistura de vocabulário coloquial e científico, pelos temas exacerbadamente macabros e pessimistas, pelo exagero sistemáticos na linguagem e no tratamento dos temas. Não obstante as controvérsias que cercam sua obra, muitos de seus versos caíram no uso popular, tais como um urubu pousou em minha sorte, a mão que afaga é a mesma que apedreja e outros. Esta é a gravação da obra completa de Augusto dos Anjos. (Sumário escrito por Leni)...

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’s Spanish Poetry Collection 001: a collection of 10 Spanish language public-domain poems.

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Poetry