Showing results by author "William Wordsworth" in All Categories

With a dynamic spirit, these great English poets made a conscious return to nostalgia and spiritual depth. Each chose a different path, but they are united in a love of moods, impressions, scenes, stories, sights and sounds. In this collection of more than forty poems are some of the finest and most memorable works in the English language.

Wordsworth's The Prelude is the consummation of his achievement as the great founder of English romanticism. An autobiography in verse, it tells of his childhood in the Lake District, his student days in Cambridge, his passion for the French Revolution and his later disenchantment with it. It also tells of his personal journey to a belief in Nature as the great moral and spiritual force which shapes human life, but on which human society all too often turns its back.

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.

Why a poetry album? Easy answer: I love poetry. I love reading it. I love memorizing it. I love hearing great actors recite it. As the poet Mark Strand wrote, “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth / There is no happiness like mine / I have been eating poetry.” In the past, when I was full from eating, I have had the audacity to set poetry to music. But, on this audiobook, you will hear the music of the poems.

Adopting the methodology of the music charts, The Classic Hundred Poems presents the "top 100" poems of all time. The selections are illuminated by the informative notes of editor William Harmon and read by an ensemble of contemporary poets including Alfred Corn and Rita Dove.

William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem The Prelude is arguably the most important piece of poetic writing in our language. Recorded in Wordsworth's home in Grasmere, Cumbria, Wordsworth looks back over events in his early life. Wordsworth believed that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, and in that way it was revolutionary in its time.

In this volume the English language reveals itself in a scale and depth that few others can compare with. It seems to be an advantage to be able to choose from over a million words and yet, it is not the words but the way in which they are used that resonate with us all. Is there some bond between the English and writing poetry? Maybe, maybe not, but let us celebrate these poems down the ages, not as one nation’s hoard but humanity’s gift.

William Wordsworth was amongst the greatest of English poets, and this wonderful recording is now available for the first time as a digital download. Included here are selections that put into perspective his great talent. The works are brought beautifully to life by Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Life is frenetic. Everything is running faster which usually means we are running later. Everything should have been done 5 minutes ago or better still yesterday. We are slowly falling behind, overwhelmed by busy lives in an ever-exacting world. In these more modern times, time is everything. There’s never enough of it. Classic poets down the decades and centuries have wisely observed that there are many things, both great and small, that bring a sense of stillness, an aura of calm, a chance to re-engage with our feelings and emotions purely by taking time for moments that matter.

A collection of the greatest poetry from the Romantic period, the battlefield and the Victorian era, read by some of the 20th century’s most renowned actors. Themes of war, love, nature, sexuality and much more are played out in these timeless readings of poetry from the 19th and 20th century.

In this collection, the authors were striving for a natural and unaffected style of verse that sought to avoid the elaborate structures and artifice that they considered had characterized much of the poetry of the 18th century. Of the 23 poems, only four are by Coleridge, including "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", which is the most famous poem in the collection. The most notable contribution by Wordsworth is the concluding poem, "Tintern Abbey".

Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow, A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new - from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s "Christmas in India", from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to Laurie Lee’s "Cider with Rosie".

William Wordsworth (1770 -1850) is one of the most popular and enduring of the English poets. His poetry is beloved for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, and its celebration of nature and of the beauty and poetry in the commonplace. Together with his friend, the poet and political activist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth helped launch the romantic age in English literature. These poems demonstrate the astonishing range and beauty of Wordsworth’s work and his sustained, coherent vision.

‘A dime a dozen’ as known in America, is perhaps equal to the English ‘cheap as chips’ but whatever the lingua franca of your choice in this series we hereby submit ‘A Rhyme a Dozen’ as 12 poems on many given subjects that are a well-rounded gathering, maybe even an essential guide, from the knowing pens of classic poets and their beautifully spoken verse to the comfort of your ears.

A unique collection of classic poetry beautifully narrated with a musical accompaniment that enhances the power and emotion of the writing. Includes poems by Keats, Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth.

Timeless poetry for moments of reflection and contemplation. The masters of literature are brought together in this unique program.

Lyrical Ballads features a selection of poems from Wordsworth and Coleridge's 1798 collaboration, which marked the beginning of the English Romantic poetry movement. In the first episode, we hear Coleridge's "Lewti" and Wordsworth's "The Thorn", while the second episode showcases Coleridge's "The Nightingale" and Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems. In the final episode, we hear Wordsworth's "Lines Written A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" and Coleridge's ballad, "Love".

This collection of 35 poems is a sequel to a volume of lyrical ballads first published in 1798. While the first volume was a collaboration between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this anthology contains verses by Wordsworth only. Generally, the poems are less well-known than those of the earlier volume but do include major narrative pieces, like "The Pastoral Epics", "The Brothers", and "Michael".

Across fifty poems our classic poets including Christina Georgina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Thomas Hardy & Dante Gabriel Rossetti find verse and tender words to match the occasion. Their descriptions of nature’s ever-evolving landscape and humanity’s ever-changing lives emblazon the page with the lively ink that shapes us all.

This poem consists of 11 stanzas of varying length, the first four of which were composed in 1802. These deal with the subject of death, a concept with which Wordsworth confesses to having struggled within childhood.