Great English Poetry

A dive into one of China's great poets by the first great populariser of Chinese literature, Arthur Waley.

In this collection, you’ll find stories conveyed through poetry and song. Some of them will no doubt be familiar to you - like Francis Scott Key’s Star Spangled Banner and Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic (although many people are only familiar with the first verse). Other poems will be entirely new to you. My hope is that you’ll embrace both the familiar and the unfamiliar as pieces of the American story that deserve to be remembered.

The soldier in the army of Jesus Christ clings to all he’s worth to his master. He knows darkness and he knows failure well. Weakness is his enemy. God turns weakness into strength. Our Lord submitted to abuse and captivity, even to the point of death, to set his captive people free. Seeds of evil bear a bitter fruit.

Do you know what goes on behind the scenes of a Hollywood basement? It's a silly little goose with her screws tied loose always on time except for every once in a blue moon. Discover what that means in a slam of "truth" with a collection of 41 poems from a radical revolutionary. An asset of space for war, romance, and underground secrets of a third-eye chakra now on Audible with added freestyle!

Written over the course of five years, these poems grapple with purpose and reality from a myriad of existentialist perspectives and themes. Through these poems, we travel through the cosmos, to various mythological settings, and even to our own neurons. If you’re seeking to rearrange your grey matter, this is the collection for you.

For students of Middle English, Andrew and Waldron's The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript has been the key edition of the four Pearl poems for over 30 years. With the changing needs of today's students in mind, the editors produced a complete prose translation of the four poems - the best known of which is "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". The near-literal translations are intended to facilitate understanding of the four poems - to lead readers to, rather than away from, the original texts.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) were both regarded as the female poet laureates of their time, and between them their writings spanned almost the entire Victorian age, from the end of Romanticism to the beginnings of Modernism. This selection of their shorter works contains all the major themes that animated them - social justice, faith, love and mortality - and some of the best-loved poetry in English, including "In The Deep Midwinter" and "How Do I Love Thee?"

Here are some of the finest poems by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a unique voice in American poetry. She is known for her short poems, full of acute observations, and deft use of language. This careful but imaginative selection shows the remarkable variety she produced, despite the miniature nature of her medium.

The ceremony itself is just two words: "I do". But lots more has been written about the anticipation, the event, and the aftermath, and The Voices of Marriage gathers the best poems ever written on this most extraordinary moment, at once the most private and the most public, in a person's life. From Shakespeare to our own day, here are poets whose lines sparkle with wit, or hush with mystery.

Love: it is the single human emotion that has inspired the most passionate and despairing poems in the language. Words sprung from the heart, this collection of our greatest love poems speaks to our deepest memories, our most ardent longings. In The Voices of Love, 10 talented actors read the enthralling testimony of poets over the centuries, who write of the heart's desires, the soul's choice. Here is life at its most intense. Listen, and be changed forever.

Considered the bridge between romanticism and modernism, Matthew Arnold wrote verse that is simple, unadorned, and straightforward. From the hypnotic and beautiful lines of "Dover Beach" to the pastoral narrative of "The Scholar Gipsy", Arnold cast a gaze at the main intellectual issues of the 19th century while giving a timeless insight into man and nature. This collection covers his major poetic works, including the narrative poems, sonnets and elegiac poems, illuminating the lyricism and serenity of Arnold's best poetry.

Walt Whitman stands out as one of poetry's towering anomalies: In celebrating the trees, water, sky and air, the bear, the eagle, the buffalo and the lion, Whitman expressed a uniquely democratic vision that engulfs not only the American continent but the entire universe. His passionate vehemence, his faith in the common man, and his unflinching pursuit of the truth gave form to an arsenal of ideas, inspiring and motivating generations of writers to come.

John Masefield (1878–1967) was one of the most prolific, popular and successful poets of the twentieth century. Masefield broke upon Edwardian literature with the startling work entitled "The Everlasting Mercy," which described the spiritual enlightenment of a drunken poacher. Over the span of his lifetime, he was appointed Poet Laureate and amassed a large number of admirers, which included such high-profile names as John Betjeman, Robert Graves and W.B. Yeats.

Down through the millennia the emotion of love has inspired countless poets to great heights of lyrical expression. In this volume listeners can sample great love poems by English and American poets. Spanning over four centuries of literary creation in the service of amour, the works include a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets, John Donne's "The Ecstasy", William Blake's "The Garden of Love", Robert Burns' "The Banks o'Doon" and "John Anderson My Jo", Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty", and more.

The idiosyncratic Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall has the unusual reputation as one of the worst poets in the English language with rhymes and rhythms that produce mirth rather than wonder. His masterpiece is The Tay Bridge Disaster. Scottish-born Gregor Fisher, who starred in Love Actually and other film and TV programs, reads the key poems and passages from the autobiography - and gets deep into character!

Here are the extraordinary writings of a generation who fought through a war of unprecedented destructive power, and who had to find new voices to express the horror of what they discovered. The great names - Owen, Sassoon - are fully represented, but there are also many poems by lesser-known or unexpected figures, ranging from serving soldiers like Isaac Rosenberg and Richard Aldington to women such as Edith Nesbit and Vera Brittain.

We all need hope. Humans have an extraordinary capacity to battle through adversity, but only if they have something to cling onto: a belief or hope that maybe, one day, things will be better. Written for his younger brother and sister in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Tomos Roberts’s heartfelt poem is as timely as it is timeless. Its message of hope and resilience, of rebirth and renewal, has captured the hearts of children and adults all over the globe—and the glimpse it offers of a fairer, kinder, more sustainable world continues to inspire thousands every day.

Over the years while writing, directing, and acting at radio theater workshops and in the Mark Time Radio Show performances at Minneapolis' CONvergence science fiction conventions, Brian Price and Jerry Stearns found that they shared a love for classic Beat poetry, Lord Buckley, and prose poems, so they started doing some of their own. This is a collection of their unique hybrid of humor, music, character, and performance.

Today, Christians in the United States of America are asleep, and it's time for them to wake up! While Jesus Christ taught his followers to love their enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute you, various presidents, politicians, and even religious talking heads command their constituents and listeners to kill their enemies, do evil to them that hate you, and bomb them that persecute you. The question is, who will you follow: the religious right or the right religion, the constitution or the word of God, the POTUS or Jesus Christ?

Charlie Shoe finds tying his laces confusing. Whenever he tries, he gets in a muddle and often gives up. But without his shoelaces tied, Charlie trips and falls, and Sophie can’t bear to watch.