Classic Poetry

She Walks in Beauty draws on poetry’s eloquent wisdom to ponder the many joys and challenges of being a woman. Caroline Kennedy has divided the collection into sections that signify to her the most notable milestones, passages, and universal experiences in a woman’s life, and she begins each of these sections with an introduction in which she explores and celebrates the most important elements of life’s journey.

This poem describes a battle with a fearsome beast called The Jabberwocky and is considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The poem is included in Lewis Carroll's 1871 novel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

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.

One of the great masterpieces of Western literature, The Odyssey chronicles the many trials and adventures Odysseus must pass through on his long journey home from the Trojan wars. Though the stormy god of the ocean is determined to keep him off course, Odysseus is clever and has the brilliant goddess Athena on his side.

Acerbic wit and stinging satire are contrasted with delicate sensibility and passionate desire in the work of the Latin poet Catullus. Armed with an urbane sophistication and an aristocratic circle of friends, Catullus moved about easily in the upper ranks of Roman society and was acquainted with Cicero, Caesar, and Pompey among others.

English literature is a treasure trove of wonderful poetry. From Shakespeare to Milton, Keats to Shelley and Tennyson to Yeats, this accessible history (especially written for Naxos Audiobooks) introduces the listener to countless small masterpieces, including all the old favorites and some lesser-known gems. Whitfield explores this most expressive of art forms and traces the historical development of a rich and diverse canon of poetical works.

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.

In this modern audio version, you get to know the amazing world of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald. Discover how Rubiyat captured the world's imagination and became one of the most famous poems ever.

This highly entertaining anthology of verse is the comic, tragic, tender, and telling story of life's seven ages, from childhood to old age. Within the framework of Shakespeare's speech, "The Seven Ages of Man," performed by Sir Ian McKellen, are 150 great poems from all ages, from Chaucer to Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman and many others. The poem are presented by the finest cast ever assembled on one recording and includes Ralph Fiennes, Dame Judi Dench, John Cleese, Michael Caine, and more.

A dark, allegorical, Gothic horror fable in verse telling of seduction, enthrallment, and deep sisterly love by the British Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti. The goblin market men, selling sweet and delicious fruits, inveigle Laura, a young girl, to partake of their tempting wares. Soon, she is lost to the world and her life begins slowly to fade away. Only the courage of her sister, Lizzie, can possibly save her from her fate. Will it be enough?

Almustafa has been exiled in the island city of Orphalese for twelve years when he sees his ship coming with the mist. Before he sets sail, the beloved prophet is asked by his followers to impart his truth. In these twenty-eight poetic essays, he offers profound inspiration on such matters of love and friendship, freedom and self-knowledge, joy and sorrow, pleasure, prayer, and death. In doing so, Almustafa offers a universal serenity. A Lebanese émigré to the United States, Gibran wrote The Prophet to transcend the barriers between East and West.

Tender and sincere, Hafiz: The Voice of God, A Hundred Odes is a powerful collection of Hafiz's first one hundred lyrical poems, or ghazals, that bring to fruition love, mysticism, and other early Sufi themes. With a keen sense of timing and verse, the translator is able to capture the lyrical, at times playful, quality as well as Hafiz's profound messages that possess elements of modern surrealism.

After living in the city of Orphalese for 12 years, a prophet is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a seeress and the people of the city, who ask him for his insights into life. The book is divided into chapters dealing with 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.

One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature, the Homeric saga of the shipwrecks, wanderings, and homecoming of the master tactician Odysseus encompasses a virtual inventory of the themes and attitudes that have shaped Western culture. The tale of Odysseus' encounters with such obstacles as Calypso, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, and the lotus-eaters, and his dramatic return to Ithaca and his patient wife, Penelope, forms a prototype for all subsequent Western epics.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in Cockermouth, in the Lake District. His Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge, was published in 1798, and shortly afterwards he settled in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with his sister Dorothy. Inspired in his early manhood by the French Revolution, he grew disillusioned with revolutionary politics and in later life became decidedly conservative. He left a vast body of work, ranging from delicately simple lyrics to deeply meditative odes.

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.

Evgenii Onegin is best known in the West through Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. But the original narrative poem (consisting of 389 stanzas, the form of which has become known as the "Pushkin sonnet") is one of the landmarks of Russian literature. In the poem, the eponymous hero repudiates love, only to later experience the pain of rejection himself. Pushkin’s unique style proves timeless in its exploration of love, life, passion, jealousy, and the consequences of social convention.

Enjoy this amazing narration of Robert Frost's poetry, including his most famous poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken, among many others.

Everyone's getting the bus but where are they going?

Libidinous, licentious, salacious and very, very funny, The Satyricon is one of the most remarkable documents from ancient Rome. It tells the ribald story of Encolpius, a man of active and varied appetites (powered notably by his passion for his favourite lover, the handsome Giton), who plunges without inhibition into the life of Roman pleasures: orgies of food, feasting, abundant sex and escapades. The kind of hedonism found occasionally in Roman mosaics is here brought to life.