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Binding: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.5408
EAN: 9780694522781
Format: Unabridged
ISBN: 0694522783
Label: Caedmon
Manufacturer: Caedmon
Number Of Items: 3
Book Pages: 2
Publication Date: 2000-04-26
Publisher: Caedmon
Product Release Date: 2000-04-26
Studio: Caedmon

A rare and thrilling listening experience. A choice gathering of some of the twentieth century's greatest poetry... read by the century's greatest poets - here available on CD

A reawakened love for the sound of poetry has made modern poems subtly different from the poems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centures. We have only to listen to these poets reading their own works to know how important their interpretations are to a full comprehension of their poems. The ministerial intonations of Eliot, the passionate orchestrations of Thomas, the very very precise formulations of Cummings, the easy conversational inflection of Frost are integral, lending subtle clarifications which go beyond the printed page.

The fact that this recording includes the voice of Yeats is something of a miracle. In the early 1930's, when the thought of recording poets occurred to few, Yeats himself made several recordings for radio broadcast. By sheer luck, an unmutilated copy was preserved; and now the rich and melodious voice can be heard by a new generation.

The Caedmon Poetry Collection eliminates the struggle for perfect communication between author and reader. Just listen and you'll understand...

Contents:

CD 1:
William Butler Yeats
The Song of the Old Mother
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
W.H. Auden
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Dylan Thomas
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child In London
Fern Hill
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Galway Kinnell
The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible
Edith Sitwell
Still Falls the Rain
Murial Rukeyser
The Speed of Darkness
May Swenson
The DNA Molecule
Robert Graves
Poem to My Son
Randall Jarrell
Eighth Air Force
Philip Levine
To My God in His Sickness
Archibald MacLeish
Epistle to Be Left in the Earth
W.S. Merwin
The Last One
Anne Sexton
Divorce, Thy Name is Woman
Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman
Carl Sandburg
The Windy City
Fog

CD 2:
William Carlos Williams
The Seafarer
E.E. Cummings
darling! because my blood can sing
if everything that happens can't be done
Joseph Brodsky
Nature Morte
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
After Apple Picking
Derek Walcott
Omeros, Book 1, Chapter1
Marianne Moore
What Are Years
Stephen Spendor
Seascape
Robert Lowell
Skunk Hour
Conrad Aiken
Tetelestai
Gertrude Stein
If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso
Richard Wilbur
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Sylvia Plath
The Thin People
Robert Penn Warren
Sirocco
American Portrait: Old Style

CD 3:

Pablo Neruda
Arte Poetica
May Sarton
Old Lovers at the Ballet
Richard Eberhart
The Groundhog
Stephen Vincent Benet
Litany for Dictatorships
James Agee
White Mane
Ezra Pound
Moeurs Contemporaines
Wallce Stevens
The Idea Of Order At Key West
Margarett Atwood
The Animals in That Country
T.S. Eliot
The Wasteland

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Excellent collection
Review: Poetry is meant to be listened to! Good collection, even if a bit uneven. The notes are not helpful.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Hearing vs Reading
Review: I'm a self-confessed philistine when it comes to poetry - even obvious and popular poems can leave me cold or confused. And it's not through want of trying.

So I thought that hearing poetry read by the author might be enlightening: and it was. This is a good collection with all the famous names from the age of early recorded sounds on thru to the end of the century: Frost, Pound, cummings, Plath. What's odd is how mannered they all sound - even the Welshman Dylan Thomas, who traded on his deep regional roots, delivers in plummy tones.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Helped me to "get" what's cool about poetry
Review: Wish I listened to this while studying poetry in school - it would have helped me to "get" the beauty and attraction of poetry.

It's great fun to read up on the poet's bios on Wikipedia while listening to each of them on this tape.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Beware! The CD is recorded incorrectly!
Review: My copy of the collection must be recorded incorrectly. The voices are sped up and sound very unnatural. The recording speed must have been set at the wrong value for each track, because some poets sound like a chipmunk and others sound almost okay. The CD plays the same way on a audiophile CD player and two different computers. I recorded a wav file and varied the sampling rate using Matlab. A technician must have transposed 22050 to 20250 Hz on some of the tracks. Though, the other track speeds don't make sense.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: I take this CD set everywhere
Review: I love slipping this CD on and just laying in my bedroom listening to some of my favorite poets read their own work-it is haunting and beautiful. If this is the sort of thing you like, then you will enjoy this collection and the price is good for 3 CDs full of poetry.

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