William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment and about the purpose of poetry. He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution and had a love affair and an illegitimate child before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. 

Wordsworth's The Prelude is the consummation of his achievement as the great founder of English romanticism. An autobiography in verse, it tells of his childhood in the Lake District, his student days in Cambridge, his passion for the French Revolution and his later disenchantment with it. It also tells of his personal journey to a belief in Nature as the great moral and spiritual force which shapes human life, but on which human society all too often turns its back.

Here is the quintessence of romance that spans not only the ages but the full range of passionate expression of love in all of its forms and stages. Authors include John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake.

The landmark selection of poems from the greatest poet of our age, read on audio by Seamus Heaney himself. 'His is "close-up" poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.(John Banville )More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of. (John Carey)

Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Jeremy Irons' perceptive reading illuminates the poetry of T. S. Eliot in all its complexity. Major poems range from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' through the post-war desolation of 'The Waste Land' and the spiritual struggle of 'Ash-Wednesday', to the enduring charm of 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

Here are some of the finest poems by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a unique voice in American poetry. She is known for her short poems, full of acute observations, and deft use of language. This careful but imaginative selection shows the remarkable variety she produced, despite the miniature nature of her medium.

Richard Burton reads from Hardy and Donne, and performs a wonderful unabridged version of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (along with Robert Hardy and John Neville).

The poetry of Burns (1759-96) is characterised by its disarming honesty and humanity, and by the poet's remarkable lyric gift. Angry or compassionate, sentimental or satirical, romantic or bawdy, Burns's poetry transcends the Scottish dialect in which it is written to speak to all of us.

A ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord siezes the throne with the help of his scheming wife - and a trio of witches. Anthony Quayle, Robert Hardy, Ian Holm, Stanley Holloway, and Jill Balcon star in an unabridged performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Acclaimed actors David Rintoul and Vivien Heilbron and eminent musicians Mhairi Lawson and Adrian Chandler present not only Burns' greatest hits, but also a selection of his lesser-known, yet fascinating works. Together these provide a comprehensive overview of his prodigious and versatile genius.