Voices of Poetry, Volume 1

J.R.R. Tolkien · Edith Sitwell · Kenneth Patchen · Theodore Roethke · Various

Nov 2023 · Voices of Poetry Book 1 · Listen & Live Audio · Narrated by J.R.R. Tolkien, Edith Sitwell, Kenneth Patchen, Theodore Roethke, Various, and Marilyn Hacker

About this audiobook

Hear rare recordings from some of the world's most-respected poets reading their own works: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hoard; E.E. Cummings, Prose Jottings; Archibald Macleish, The Old Man to the Lizard; Ted Hughes, Six Young Men; May Swenson, Naked in Borneo; Marilyn Hacker, The Dark Twin; Kenneth Patchen, 23rd Street Runs into Heaven; Edith Sitwell, An Old Woman; Theodore Roethke, The Bat.

Recording obtained and published by Rick Sheridan.

©2009 Rick Sheridan (P)2009 Rick Sheridan

About the author

A Harvard University graduate, e e cummings lived in Greenwich Village and spent his summers on a farm in New Hampshire. He was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While working for the American Red Cross in France in 1917, cummings was mistakenly imprisoned for several months. This experience resulted in the publication of a novel, The Enormous Room (1922). Although he went on to write other prose, it is for his poetry that he is best known. He also published plays, wrote a ballet, and was a respected painter. He was awarded many honors for his work, including the 1958 Bollingen Prize for poetry and the National Book Award in 1955. Although he used many techniques to stress his meaning, he wrote about the traditional subjects of love, nature, and the corrupting influence of materialism. cummings delivered lectures while at Harvard in 1952; in that same year, he was awarded an honorary seat as a guest professor. He also wrote the delightful commentaries for the 50 photographs in Adventures in Value by his wife, Marion Morehouse, a fine and sensitive photographer cummings died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 in North Conway, New Hampshire at the Memorial Hospital. His cremated remains were buried in Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory in Boston. "One of America's most unusual and powerful contemporary poets," said the San Francisco Chronicle of this versatile West Coast poet, writer, and painter. Born in Niles, Ohio, Patchen worked in all sorts of jobs before settling in California. In 1957 he pioneered in the "public birth of poetry---jazz" by reading his poems to the accompaniment of the Chamber Jazz Sextet in nightclubs and concert halls on the West Coast, breaking attendance records in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1954 he received the Shelley Memorial Award. Patchen died in 1972 after a prolonged illness, during which he continued to write prolifically. Ted Hughes was born on August 17, 1930 in England and attended Cambridge University, where he became interested in anthropology and folklore. These interests would have a profound effect on his poetry. In 1956, Hughes married famed poet Sylvia Plath. He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1957 until 1959, and he stopped writing altogether for several years after Plath's suicide in 1963. Hughes's poetry is highly marked by harsh and savage language and depictions, emphasizing the animal quality of life. He soon developed a creature called Crow who appeared in several volumes of poetry including A Crow Hymn and Crow Wakes. A creature of mythic proportions, Crow symbolizes the victim, the outcast, and a witness to life and destruction. Hughes's other works also created controversy because of their style, manner, and matter, but he has won numerous honors, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1960, and the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1974. His greatest honor came in 1984, when he was named Poet Laureate of England. Ted Hughes died in 1998.