Classic Poetry

The Irish Classics Collection is a wide-ranging collection of 9 classic works of fiction and poetry by Irish authors, read by an award-winning cast of narrators. Included here are stories by some of the greatest writers of all time, including James Joyce; Bram Stoker; Oscar Wilde; W.B. Yeats; Elizabeth Bowen; and more.

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.

Perhaps the first great and truly "American" poet, Walt Whitman's writing reflected the idealism and turbulence of the mid-19th century. His poetry broke new stylistic ground with its unconventional meter and rhyme schemes, yet celebrated democratic values, the beauty of nature, and the complex variety and vitality of American life.

In Stephen Mitchell's The Iliad, the epic story resounds again across 2,700 years, as if the lifeblood of its heroes Achilles and Patroclus, Hector, and Priam flows in every word. And we are there with them, amid the horror and ecstasy of war, carried along by a poetry that lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful. Mitchell's The Iliad is the first translation based on the work of the preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West.

Gibran considered The Prophet his greatest achievement. He said: "I think I've never been without The Prophet since I first conceived it in Mount Lebanon. It seems to have been a part of me....I kept the manuscript four years before I delivered it over to my publisher because I wanted to be sure, I wanted to be very sure, that every word of it was the very best I had to offer."

Jack London was an outstanding American writer, publicist and public figure, the author of numerous adventure stories and tales. Jack London is famous for his short stories and novels, but he also enthusiastically studied poetry and even made an attempt to establish a reputation for himself as a poet.

The Inferno is the first part of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s epic poem describing man's progress from hell to paradise. In it, the author is lost in dark woods, threatened by wild beasts and unable to find the right path to salvation. Notable for its nine circles of hell, the poem vividly illustrates the poetic justice of punishments faced by earthly sinners. The Inferno is perhaps the most popular of the three books of The Divine Comedy, which is widely considered the preeminent work in Italian literature.

Enoch Arden first came to international attention with a recording by Claude Raines and Glenn Gould, but it has since drifted back to obscurity. This is a work that both Luxon and Moyer have loved for many years. The poem is immediately accessible to any audience and tells a heart-wrenching story of friendship, love, separation, and sacrifice. The masterful score creates a powerful soundtrack to the saga.

Also known as the Roman Elegies, Erotica Romana is von Goethe's literary tribute to human sexuality and eroticism. Written in 24 elegies to emulate classical Roman elegy writers such as Tibullus, Propertius, and Catullus, von Goethe creates a lyrical work of art that has often been subject to censorship because of the erotic content.

The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore performed by Glenn Haskell will no doubt become a Christmas tradition in many homes.

Una historia irresistible y un mensaje al puro estilo de Roald Dahl: no crezcas nunca, aunque te hagas mayor.

The most famous of the three canticles that compose The Divine Comedy, "Inferno" describes Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life, with Virgil as a guide. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonizing torture, Dante encounters doomed souls that include the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicidal Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit.

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.

The original and immortal poem also known as "A Visit from St. Nicholas". Classic Tales narrator B. J. Harrison gives a stellar reading of this Christmas classic.

When sleep was at its deepest, night at its blackest, up from the mist-filled marsh came Grendel stalking. Thus begins the battle between good and evil, for lying in wait and anxious to challenge the ogre Grendel is a young man, strong-willed and fire-hearted. This man is Beowulf, whose heroic dragon-slaying deeds were sung in the courts of Anglo-Saxon England more than a thousand years ago.

Have you ever been to a King Lear performance with the impression of not having understood everything? It's normal. Shakespeare's plays are the most beautiful of the theatrical repertoire, but you cannot go to a Shakespeare play if you do not have a minimum prepared this show: understand the issues, characters, context, cultural or historical references is indispensable. The same is true if you intend to read a play by William Shakespeare: our summaries will help you better understand what you have read.

Yves Bonnefoy lit ses propres textes, fragments de sa première œuvre "Du mouvement et de l'immobilité du Douve", parue en 1953 jusqu'aux "Planches courbes", recueil publié en 2001. L'unité de l'écriture, en dialogue avec elle-même, se révèle dans la voix de son auteur. Le jeu de miroir, déjà présent dans l'œuvre d'Yves Bonnefoy, prend toute sa dimension dans le mouvement de son propre souffle, dans la respiration du poète qui lit ses vers, à la fois réflexifs et attachés au réel.

“If music be the food of love, play on" was one of Shakespeare’s finest lines. If music is food then poetry is the wine. In this volume of classic love poetry the flavoured capture of words and rhythms makes us think more carefully of words and their value to us. They also surprise us with their structure and meaning, layering in thoughts and emotions that we might otherwise shy away from. Poems are wonderful ways to express what we feel for a very special someone.

One of the greatest prose writers and social commentators of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley here introduces us to a delightfully cynical, comic, and severe group of artists and intellectuals engaged in the most free-thinking and modern kind of talk imaginable. Poetry, occultism, ancestral history, and Italian primitive painting are just a few of the subjects competing for discussion among the amiable cast of eccentrics drawn together at Crome, an intensely English country manor.

Hesiod's Theogony is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be and how they established permanent control over the cosmos. It is the first Greek mythical cosmogony. The initial state of the universe is chaos - a dark, indefinite void considered a divine primordial condition from which everything else appeared.