Ancient Poetry

"Et tu bois cet alcool brûlant comme ta vie Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau de vie." Premier recueil de poèmes d'Apollinaire, "Alcools" est publié en 1913, alors que certains poèmes du recueil ont été écrits dès 1902. Apollinaire y mêle différents motifs comme la souffrance amoureuse, la mélancolie et le passage du temps, la ville moderne, ou encore le quotidien dans son exploration des paysages rhénans.

Dante narre un voyage à travers les trois règnes supraterrestres qui le conduira jusqu'à la vision de la Trinité. C'est avec la plus grande maîtrise de cette œuvre que Jacques Roland nous charme de sa voix profonde tout au long de la lecture des trois cantiques.

The iconic love story of the Middle East, by a 12th-century Persian poet who has been compared to Shakespeare for his subtlety, inventiveness, and dramatic force, Layli and Majnun tells of star-crossed lovers whose union is tragically thwarted by their families and whose passion continues to ripple out across the centuries. Theirs is a love that lasts a lifetime, and in Nezami's immortal telling, erotic longing blends with spiritual self-denial in an allegory of Sufi aspiration, as the amenities of civilization give way to the elemental wilderness.

This group of 19th-century American poets was the first to rival their British counterparts in popularity. Gathered around their New England roots, they were also known as the Schoolroom or Household poets and comprised of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell and Olivier Wendell Holmes, Sr. Occasionally Ralph Waldo Emerson was included, although his poetic philosophy differed in some key aspects.

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) is best known for his epic poem Metamorphoses, a collection of myths and legends from Ancient Greece and Rome. His works continue to be widely read and admired, and he is regarded as one of the most significant poets of ancient Rome. Ovid’s love poems are both brilliant and evocative. In Amores, the romantic mysteriousness of elegiac love-poetry is exploded by his witty and ironic treatment of the form. Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris both lay down the rules for the game of love, which both sexes can play.

The Iliad and The Odyssey are epic poems traditionally attributed to Homer, of which the written versions are dated to the 8th century BCE. Chronicling events in the Greek Bronze Age, this magnificent pair of poems forms the cornerstone of Western literature. If The Iliad is a classic war story, The Odyssey is symbolic of the individual’s journey through life.

William Butler Yeats remains one of the most popular poets of the 20th century.

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," "Down by the Salley Gardens," "The Secret Rose": these are just a few of the poems that made William Butler Yeats an international figure. Born in Dublin in 1865, Yeats drew strength from the Irish tradition, as can be seen in this special audiobook, which presents the most important poems in the context of his life and ambitions.

One of the great icons of mysticism, by the Persian poet who has captured today’s spiritual audience - now in a first-ever English translation by his premier interpreter. In an intriguing and deeply personal introduction to the exquisitely packaged The Glance, Coleman Barks interprets this love that transcends time, gender, sex, and age. This program features 12 sensational poems enhanced with music to intensify the mystical Rumi experience.

Harmonium was American poet Wallace Stevens's first book, published when he was 44 years old. It represents his complete poetic output up to that point in his life. It is now considered a masterpiece, one of the great contributions to literary Modernism. It is a mixture of pure, rational, philosophical thought, and imaginary nonsense-verse. It is striking in its diversity and includes some of Stevens' best known and most-loved poems.

The Theogony (composed c. 700 BC) is a poem by Hesiod (8th-7th century BC) describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods. A theogony is a part of Greek mythology which attempts to articulate reality as a whole. Hesiod's work is a synthesis of various local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells of their origin and how they established control over the Cosmos.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of 45 poems by English poet William Blake. "Songs of Innocence" is the first part of the collection and appeared in 1789 with engraved illustrations by Blake. The second part, "Songs of Experience", also illustrated, was added in 1794 when Blake published the whole under the full title of Songs of Innocence and Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

Humphries has rendered (Ovid's) love poetry with conspicuous success into English which is neither obtrusively colloquial nor awkwardly antique.

I first read Edward Fitzgerald’s celebrated, if controversial, version of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat when I happened upon it in my father’s extensive library when I was a sophomore at Notre Dame High School. While there is much debate about Omar Khayyam’s philosophical outlook (is his message Sufi-oriented or existentially hedonistic?), there is no doubting its beauty and its profundity of thought.

Odysseus has been away from Ithaca, the Greek city-state under his rule, for ten years while fighting in the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus begins the long journey home to his wife and son; however, his journey is plagued by misfortune as the gods feud over his fate, leaving the Ithacans to believe that he has died. In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

Versión en prosa de uno de los clásicos absolutos de la literatura universal: "La Ilíada" de Homero, que narra el rapto de Helena de Troya a manos de Paris y la posterior guerra entre aqueos y troyanos por recuperarla, con la intervención de las diferentes fuerzas de la naturaleza encarnadas por dioses y semidioses. Una lectura capital para todos aquellos aficionados a la Grecia clásica y a la buena literatura.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world.

Beowulf is the greatest surviving work of literature in Old English, unparalleled in its epic grandeur and scope. It tells the story of the heroic Beowulf and of his battles, first with the monster Grendel, who has laid waste to the great hall of the Danish king Hrothgar, then with Grendel's avenging mother and finally with a dragon that threatens to devastate his homeland.

Commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf is an epic poem that traces the exploits of the titular hero. After coming to the aid of the king of the Danes, whose mead hall is under constant attack by the monster Grendel, Beowulf slays Grendel's mother and goes on to become the king of the Geats.

Published at the author’s own expense in 1896, after rejection from publishers, this collection contains a cycle of 63 poems. Despite exploring themes of lost love, obsession, pessimism, and death, the poems touched English readers and the book became a best seller during the Second Boer War and World War I. The collection, set in a half-imagined pastoral Shropshire, includes the well-known poems "When I Was One-and-Twenty", "To an Athlete Dying Young", and "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now".

Le narrateur prend le bus à une heure d'affluence. Il observe un jeune homme avec un chapeau et un cou trop long. Celui-ci s'énerve contre son voisin qui, dit-il, le bouscule chaque fois que passe quelqu'un. Voyant une place libre, il finit par aller s'asseoir. Deux heures plus tard, le narrateur voit le jeune homme place Saint-Lazare qui discute avec un ami de questions vestimentaires. Cette brève histoire est racontée quatre-vingt-dix-neuf fois, de quatre-vingt-dix-neuf manières différentes. Mise en images, portée sur la scène des cabarets, elle a connu une fortune extraordinaire.