Voices of Poetry, Volume 2

Edna St. Vincent Millay · Ezra Pound · Marianne Moore · Philip Levine · Richard Eberhart · Robert Graves · Stephen Spender · Vachel Lindsay · William Butler Yeats · Various

Nov 2023 · Voices of Poetry Book 2 · Listen & Live Audio · Narrated by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Philip Levine, Richard Eberhart, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, Vachel Lindsay, William Butler Yeats, and Various

About this audiobook

Hear rare recordings from some of the world's most-respected poets reading their own works: Ezra Pound, Old Men With Beautiful Manners; William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle Of Innisfree; Robert Graves, A Last Poem; Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver; Richard Eberhart, The Groundhog; Philip Levine, Blasting from Heaven; Marianne Moore, The Mind is an Enchanting Thing; Stephen Spender, What I Expected; Vachel Lindsay, An Interpolation by Mr. Lindsay.

Recording obtained and published by Rick Sheridan.

©2009 Rick Sheridan (P)2009 Rick Sheridan

About the author

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. Yeats' plays included The Countess Cathleen, The Land of Heart's Desire, Cathleen ni Houlihan, The King's Threshold, and Deirdre. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He is one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize. His poetry collections include The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Tower, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, and Last Poems and Plays. He died on January 28, 1939 at the age of 73. Edna St. Vincent Millay 1892-1950 Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet, dramatist, lyricist, lecturer, and playwright, was born on February 22, 1892 in Rockland, Maine, and educated at Barnard College and at Vassar College, where she earned her B. A. (Her poem "Renascence" won fourth place in a contest and was published in The Lyric Year in 1912; this resulted in a scholarship to Vassar.) Millay's first volume of poetry, "Renascence and Other Poems," was published in 1917. In 1923, "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" won her a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Other works include: "A Few Figs from Thistles;" "Sonnets in American Poetry," "A Miscellany," "The Lamp and the Bell" and "There Are No Islands Any More." Millay also wrote the libretto for "The King's Henchman," one of the few American grand operas. Edna St. Vincent Millay married Eugen Jan Boissevain in 1923. Shortly after, they purchased a farm in upstate New York, which they called Steepletop. Millay lived here for the rest of her life, composing some of her finest work in a little shack separate from the main house. Boissevain died in 1949. Millay died of a heart attack in her home on October 19, 1950. Stephen Harold Spender was born on February 28, 1909 in London, England. He was educated at University College, Oxford University. With the help of a small independent income, he left Oxford in 1931 to devote himself entirely to poetry writing. His first collection of poetry, Twenty Poems, was published in 1930. His other poetry collections include Poems of Dedication, Edge of Being: Poems, and Dolphins. His first prose book, The Destructive Element, was published in 1934. His other works included The Burning Cactus, Forward from Liberalism, European Witness, World Within World, Learning Laughter, The Year of the Young Rebels, Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities, and The Thirties and After. He also taught English literature at several universities including the University College of London University. He was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1962 and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1971. In 1965, he was the first non-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry in English to the Library of Congress. He was knighted in 1983. He died on July 16, 1995 at the age of 86. Robert Graves (also known as Robert Ranke Graves) was born in 1895 in London and served in World War I. Goodbye to All That: an Autobiography (1929), was published at age thirty three, and gave a gritty portrait of his experiences in the trenches. Graves edited out much of the stark reality of the book when he revised it in 1957. Although his most popular works, I, Claudius (1934) and its sequel, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (1935), were produced for television by the BBC in 1976 and seen in America on Masterpiece Theater, he was also famous as a poet, producing more than 50 volumes of poetry. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God. Also a distinguished academic, Graves was a professor of English in Cairo, Egypt, in 1926, a poetry professor at Oxford in the 1960s, and a visiting lecturer at universities in England and the U.S. He wrote translations of Greek and Latin works, literary criticism, and nonfiction works on many other topics, including mythology and poetry. He lived most of his life in Majorca, Spain, and died after a protracted illness in 1985. Born in Minnesota and educated at Dartmouth College and Cambridge (on a Rhodes Scholarship) and Harvard universities, Richard Eberhart has served as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress (1959-66), and has won the Bollingen Prize (1962) and the Pulitzer Prize (1966). He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan on January 10, 1928. Starting at the age of 14, he held a series of industrial jobs including working in a soap factory, hefting cases of soft drinks at a bottling plant, manning a punch press at Chevrolet Gear and Axle, and operating a jackhammer at Detroit Transmission. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Wayne State University and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first collection of poetry, On the Edge, was published in 1961. His other poetry collections included 1933, Not This Pig, They Feed They Lion, A Walk with Tom Jefferson, The Mercy, and Breath. He won numerous awards during his lifetime including the 1977 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Names of the Lost, the 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award for Ashes: Poems New and Old and 7 Years from Somewhere, the 1987 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his body of work, the National Book Award for Ashes: Poems New and Old in 1980 and for What Work Is in 1991, and a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Simple Truth. He was appointed the Library of Congress 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry from 2011 to 2012. His poetry appeared in several publications including The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine. He also published a collection of autobiographical essays entitled Bread of Time and edited an anthology entitled The Essential Keats. He died of pancreatic cancer on February 14, 2015 at the age of 87.