Poetry

Soup of Alphabets, Volume 002

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Poetry
Chapter: 11 | Listen: 2

A second helping of Alphabet Books! This collection has a wide-ranging variety of short books, and not only for younger readers, but also for young and not so young adults. Opening with a book based on the colorful language of London’s street vendors, this collection winds its way through a book of tongue-twisters, two primers of nonsense poetry by the inimitable Edward Lear, and early readers from 19th century England. For older readers, there is the biting, sardonic humor of Hilaire Belloc’s satirical alphabet verses. There is even a “Baseball ABC,” a recording which will be released in time for the World Series playoffs! Soup’s on! (Summary by Denny Sayers) [chương_files]

Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems

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Poetry
Chapter: 107 | Listen: 3

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 – 1806) was an English poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility. It was in 1784, in debtor’s prison with her husband Benjamin, that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets. The work achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith’s sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels. Stuart Curran, the editor of Smith’s poems, has written that Smith is “the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic”. She helped shape the “patterns of thought and conventions of style” for the period. Romantic poet William Wordsworth was the most affected by her works. He said of Smith in the 1830s that she was “a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered”. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Smith was largely forgotten. [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 054

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Poetry
Chapter: 20 | Listen: 1

LibriVox’s Short Poetry Collection 054: a collection of 20 public-domain poems. [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 058

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Poetry
Chapter: 20 | Listen: 1

LibriVox’s Short Poetry Collection 058: a collection of 20 public-domain poems. [chương_files]

Astrophil and Stella

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Poetry, Sonnets
Chapter: 5 | Listen:

Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet sequence written by Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet and courtier. It details the frustrated love of Astrophil (whose name means “star-lover”) for his beloved Stella (whose name means “star”). It is likely that Sidney based his poems on his own unrequited passion for a married woman. The sequence inspired other sonnet writers of the period, such as Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Wroth. (Summary written by Elizabeth Klett) [chương_files]