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Mountain Idylls, and Other Poems

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Single Author
Chapter: 58 | Listen: 1

“The author of this unpretentious volume has long questioned the advisability of adding a book to our already inflated and overloaded literature, unless it should contain something in the nature of a deviation from beaten literary paths. Whether the reading public will regard this as such or not is a question for the future to determine, as every book is a creature of circumstance, and at the date of its publication an algebraic unknown quantity. It was not the original intention of the author to publish any of his effusions in collective form until more mature years and riper judgment should better qualify him for the task of composition, and should enable him to still further pursue the important studies of etymology, rhetoric, Latin and Greek, and complete the education which youthful environment denied. On the 17th of March, A.D. 1900, occurred an accident in the form of a premature mining explosion which banished the light of the Colorado sun from his eyes forever, adding the almost insurmountable barrier of total and hopeless blindness to those of limited means and insufficient education. At first further effort seemed useless, but as time meliorates in some degree even the most deplorable and distressing physical conditions, ambition slowly rallied, and while lying for several months a patient in various hospitals in an ineffectual attempt to regain even partial sight, the following ideas and efforts of past years were gradually recalled from the recesses of memory, and reduced to their present form, in which, […]

Boys and Girls

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Single Author
Chapter: 114 | Listen:

A collection of charming poems by James W. Foley, Poet Laureate of North Dakota where he was also city editor of the Bismarck Tribune. Each poem is written from the point of view of children or about children. (Summary by Larry Wilson) [chương_files]

Silverpoints

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Single Author
Chapter: 29 | Listen: 1

Silverpoints is the first collection of poems by John Gray. Some saw Gray as a protégé of Oscar Wilde, who agreed to underwrite the publication of Silverpoints. It includes Gray’s original poems and his translations from the French of Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire. – Summary by Rob Marland [chương_files]

How Salvator Won and Other Recitations

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Single Author
Chapter: 63 | Listen: 3

Ella Wheeler Wilcox is an American poet known for her popular lyrics that capture positive and uplifting themes. This volume is quite diverse, including the concluding piece that is read as a little play. Her preface to expresses the unique character of this collection. “I am constantly urged by readers and impersonators to furnish them with verses for recitation. In response to this ever-increasing demand I have selected, for this volume, the poems which seem suitable for such a purpose. In making my collection I have been obliged to use, not those which are among my best efforts in a literary or artistic sense, but those which contain the best dramatic possibilities for professionals. Several of the poems are among my earliest efforts, others were written expressly for this book. In “Meg’s Curse,” which has never before been in print, and in several others, I ignored all rules of art for the purpose of giving the public reader a better chance to exercise his elocutionary powers.- Summary by Larry Wilson [chương_files]

Collected Poems of Lord Alfred Douglas

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Single Author
Chapter: 64 | Listen: 1

This is a chronologically arranged collection of poems compiled by the author in his late 40s, after he had discarded the Uranian themes of his youth. Douglas was primarily a sonneteer, and this collection features shorter poems about love, hatred, nature, religion, death, and even the art of poetry itself. It does not include Two Loves, the poem made famous by Oscar Wilde’s defence of it in his 1895 trials. – Summary by Rob Marland [chương_files]

Over Here and Over There

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Single Author, War & Military
Chapter: 11 | Listen: 1

In publishing this book I have no intention whatsoever to offer a work of great literary value. As such it would undoubtedly be a failure, because, being of a non-English-speaking race, and only having been in this country a comparatively short time before going over to France, I cannot claim a mastery of the English language. It has merely been my intention to express the spirit which led me to America and thence with Pershing’s Expeditionary Forces to France. (From Introductory) [chương_files]

Maud, and Other Poems (Version 2)

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Chapter: 9 | Listen:

Surely everyone knows “Maud”? Isn’t that the Victorian love song, where the man waits by the garden gate for his lover to appear for a secret rendezvous? Well, that may be the song, but Tennyson’s poem is longer and very much darker. It deals not with love but with the obsession of an unstable young man with the seventeen-year-old Maud, and his gradual descent into madness. The poem’s narrator has been excluded from an evening ball being held at Maud’s home, The Hall, and has climbed into her garden uninvited, convincing himself by a misreading the Language of Flowers that she has sent him a love-token in the form of a rose blossom. After the guests have left, Maud and her brother step out into the dawn, and soon the brother is lying mortally wounded at the narrator’s hand. He flees abroad, and later loses his reason after hearing of Maud’s own death. Finally, the narrator insists that he has at last recovered from his “old hysterical mock-disease” and has awakened to a better mind, fighting for his country in the Crimean War. But can he be believed? Many early reviewers took the narrator as stating the poet’s own views on war, but Tennyson himself responded that he would hardly have chosen a narrator with an “hereditary vein of insanity” to represent his personal opinions. The collection includes several other well-known Tennyson poems, including “The Brook, an Idyl”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. (Summary by Michael Maggs) […]

In a Belgian Garden and Other Poems

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Single Author
Chapter: 28 | Listen: 1

These magnificent poems written by a lover of the natural splendor of untrodden lands are both thrilling and exhilarating. Visions and observations of the wonders of creation are gradually unlocked and elegantly illustrated in ways hitherto unimagined by the passive observer of the eclectic world that surrounds us, while sparing no omission of the very obvious and egregious rampant destruction, both physical and moral, of the Great War. Frank Oliver Call, the poet, the educator, the skillful wordsmith takes us on a journey to lands near and far, both those untouched by the ravages of civilization and those savagely ravaged by that same civilization run amok. While deftly expressing his love and awe for the raw beauty of nature and his condemnation for “Death’s dark wing” that had drifted over places tranquil and serene he once cherished, the poet concedes that much of life and its possible purpose is not nor never can be understood by us mortals. However, recognizing the imperative nature of life itself Call goes on to acknowledge that, “onward driven must our frail barques go,” while adding the plea, “O God, that we might know, might only know!” Come, then, come on this magical exploration of an era since passed, an era of beauty but one of death, destruction and devastation. Let us appreciate the prescience of this poet’s description of lives altogether too able to be transformed in an instant from peace to furious frenzy. And let us dream, dream of how idyllic life could, […]

Harmonium

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Single Author
Chapter: 18 | Listen: 2

This is the first edition of Stevens’s first book, with poetry written between 1914 and 1923. A later edition was printed with the inclusion of additional poems and, somewhat surprisingly, three of the earlier poems omitted. – Summary by KevinS [chương_files]

Kobzar of the Ukraine

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Chapter: 38 | Listen:

In these poems speaks the struggling soul of a downtrodden people. To our western folk, reared in happier surroundings there is a bitter tang about some of them, somewhat like the taste of olives, to which one must grow accustomed . The Slavonic temperament, too, is given to melancholy and seems to dwell congenially in an atmosphere misty with tears. But he gravely misreads their literature who fails to perceive the grim resolve beneath the sorrow. In the struggle of the Ukrainians for freedom the spirit of this poet, who was born a serf, remains ever their guiding star. The translator of these poems spent considerable time in arriving at an understanding of the spirit of the poems and the nature of the situations described. Then the more formidable task was approached of trying to carry over not only the thought but something of the style, spirit and music of the original into the English tongue. – Summary by Introduction [chương_files]