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Lyrical Ballads (1798)

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Poetry
Chapter: 24 | Listen: 2

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry. Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only four poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (Additionally, though only the two writers are credited for the works, William’s sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary which held powerful descriptions of everyday surroundings influenced William’s poetry immensely.) (Summary by Wikipedia) [chương_files]

Absalom and Achitophel

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Poetry, Satire
Chapter: 2 | Listen:

John Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel: A Poem in 1681. It is an elaborate historical allegory using the political situation faced by King David (2 Samuel 14-18) to mirror that faced by Charles II. Each monarch had a son whom a high-ranking minister attempted to use against him. James Scott, first Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, was detected planning a rebellion late in 1681, supposedly instigated by the Earl of Shaftesbury, who was tried for high treason, and it is believed that Dryden wrote the poem in an effort to sway the jury in his trial. The fates of both Absalom (Monmouth) and Achitophel (Shaftesbury) are left unspecified at the end of the poem (Monmouth did rebel in 1685, after his father’s death, and was executed, and Shaftesbury was acquitted), but we are left to surmise that their fates would resemble those of their Biblical counterparts: Absalom was killed against David’s instructions and Achitophel hanged himself. The poem can be enjoyed without any special knowledge of either the Bible or seventeenth-century English history, but it is useful to understand why Monmouth (AKA Absalom) was such a useful tool to use against his father: Charles had many illegitimate offspring, but his wife was barren, so at his death the crown would pass (did pass) to his brother, James, who was Catholic, but Monmouth was Protestant as well as well-beloved by both the king and the people. England had good reason to dread a return of officially enforced Catholicism. The […]

Alonso Fitz and Other Stories

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Essay/Short nonfiction, Fiction, Literature, Short Stories
Chapter: 13 | Listen: 2

A collection of Twain short stories including: The Loves Of Alonzo Fitz Clarence And Rosannah Ethelton On The Decay Of The Art Of Lying About Magnanimous-Incident Literature The Grateful Poodle The Benevolent Author The Grateful Husband Punch, Brothers, Punch The Great Revolution In Pitcairn The Canvasser’s Tale An Encounter With An Interviewer Paris Notes Legend Of Sagenfeld, In Germany Speech On The Babies Speech On The Weather Concerning The American Language Rogers [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 128

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Poetry
Chapter: 29 | Listen: 3

This is a collection of 29 poems read by LibriVox volunteers for January 2014. [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 089

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Poetry
Chapter: 32 | Listen:

This is a collection of poems read by LibriVox volunteers for the month of July 2010. [chương_files]

On the Elementary Electrical Charge

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Essay/Short nonfiction, Fiction, Non-fiction, Science
Chapter: 3 | Listen: 3

The experiments herewith reported were undertaken with the view of introducing certain improvements into the oil-drop method of determining e and N and thus obtaining a higher accuracy than had before been possible in the evaluation of these most fundamental constants. From the Physical Review, Vol. II, No. 2 [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 092

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Poetry
Chapter: 22 | Listen: 2

This is a collection of poems recorded by LibriVox volunteers for the month of November 2010. [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 182

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Poetry
Chapter: 41 | Listen: 1

This is a collection of 41 poems read in English by LibriVox volunteers for July 2018. [chương_files]

Short Poetry Collection 142

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Poetry
Chapter: 23 | Listen: 4

This is a collection of 23 poems read by LibriVox volunteers for March 2015. Two poems of medium length in this collection: #04 “Copernicus” (13:38) is from the volume “Watchers of the Sky” by Alfred Noyes. #12 “A Joyful Meditation of the Coronation of King Henry the Eighth” (14:12). The original text was published as an eight-page pamphlet. In the surviving copy, the bottoms of the pages have been cropped. A total of three lines are therefore missing, and a further three have been reconstructed from their surviving portions. The html version of the poem shows these reconstructions. This poem has been read using modern English pronunciation. Some words have no modern equivalent, including such words as encensing, entenderment, soote, boote, withouten, inuentions, contrarious, and minnish which is short for dimminish. Emyspery = hemisphere. Quayre (quire) = an eight-page printed booklet. Tene = harm, injury or hurt. Rother = rudder The “monk of bery” was John Lydgate of Bury St. Edmunds (c. 1370 – c. 1451) a monk and poet. [chương_files]

Robert Browning

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Essay/Short nonfiction, Fiction, Literature, Non-fiction
Chapter: 24 | Listen: 3

There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: “When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant–God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means. [chương_files]