Classic English Style

Many masters employed the form of the sonnet, including Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, and Robert Bridges. However, the most celebrated, and oft quoted, examples are to be found in the collection by Shakespeare, first published in 1609. In the 154 poems, Shakespeare surveys and dissects the subject of love in all its guises, and its relationship with youth, age, illness, death, and memory.

This epic poem by Edmund Spenser is the longest poem in the English language. It is an allegorical work, written in praise of Queen Elizabeth I. Michael MacLiammoir reads a selection from Book III.

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is a haunting ballad describing a young knight whose very lifeblood and vitality have been drained by a beautiful but parasitic, fairylike vampire. This knight has now been left as an undead shell of his former self, alone on a barren hillside.

The 98-stanza meter-and-rhyme translation of "Legenda Luceafarului" - an entrancing masterpiece by Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), the Romanian national poet - captures the essence of the original work's musicality and poetic nuance. It is the story of a young princess' longing and impossible love for the immortal star who, sharing her love, takes human form and tries to become mortal.

The Georgics was published in 29 BCE, and is the second major work by the Latin poet Virgil. Its a fascinating insight into rural life and farming of the time.

The origins, history and authorship of Beowulf are shrouded in uncertainty. This heroic epic probably began, as most do, with a wandering troubadour strumming a stringed instrument, sitting before a hearth-fire, and singing the verses to a spellbound audience arrayed before him. Beowulf is a rousing adventure story, filled with intrepid heroes, monsters and fire-breathing dragons, which can be listened to for the sheer enjoyment of the tale.

This is a story from the Canterbury Tales II: Modern Verse Translation collection.

Drum-Taps is a collection of poetry written by Walt Whitman during the American Civil War and first published in 1865. Drum-Taps contains poems that bear witness to the violence of war.

Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins - the Pandavas and the Kouravas - but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination.

"Ex Oblivione" is a prose poem by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in late 1920 or early 1921 and first published in The United Amateur in March 1921, under the pseudonym Ward Phillips. It is written in first person and tells of the dreams of a presumably dying man. In his dreams, the man is walking through a valley and encounters a vine-covered wall with a locked bronze gate therein. He longs to know what lies beyond the gate.

The Paradiso is a culminating aspect of a journey from Inferno to Paradiso, and it is also Dante’s vision of the variety, the paradoxes, and the wonder that human beings have any existence at all. The process of listening to Dante’s Comedy is a journey into not just literature but into the mysteries of human nature and its capacity for unhappiness and happiness, folly and wisdom, rejection and wonder over the miracles of creation and existence.

The Witch of Atlas is a poetic narrative, written in 1820 and published posthumously in 1824. The witch is the daughter of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. The plot is built around her adventures, during which she creates an androgynous creature, Hermaphroditus, who is both the companion of and the servant to the witch. She plays a series of pranks upon mankind, with the ultimate aim of revealing the essential foolishness of oppression and conflict and enabling the realization of a final Utopia.

Spoon River Anthology is a collection of poems that describe life - and death - in a small town. Each poem is a monologue delivered by a resident of Spoon River, describing events in their lives, and the circumstances that led to their occasionally untimely end. Edgar Lee Masters wrote this theatrical masterpiece to highlight the typical small town. The fascinating characters and realistic imagery make it easy to see why this is an American classic. 

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in The New York Times Review of Books hails as "a distinguished achievement." If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life.

Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins - the Pandavas and the Kouravas - but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination.