Showing results by publisher "Spoken Realms" in Poetry

Hilda Doolittle was an American poet and novelist who was one of the founders of the Imagist movement, which includes such poetic luminaries as Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, with both of whom Doolittle had romantic relationships.

Possibly one of the most dissected poems ever, Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism, and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

Enough Rope was Dorothy Parker's first published collection of poems, and was a best seller. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity."

This 1918 novella presents the life history of an ideal inamorata, universally admired and doomed to an untimely passing. The author uses the story to explore in-depth the concept of beauty, both personal and spiritual.

Who among us would not wish the return of our lost loved one? Our narrator, while in the depths of grief for his "Lenore", is visited by a talking raven. Is this supernatural raven a voice from the other side, or is our narrator merely following a slow, sorrowful descent into madness?

Paul Revere is the subject, and his famous ride is the adventure found in this short poem by acclaimed author Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Robert Ernest Vernede [1875-1917] was an English poet and writer of short stories, most remembered as a war poet of WWI. Wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he recovered and returned to the front and was killed by machine-gun fire at Havrincourt in 1917. "England to the Sea" was published in Poems of the Great War, in 1914.

"The Stars in Their Courses" by John Freeman [1880 - 1929] was published in Poems of the Great War in 1914 on behalf of The Prince of Wales’ national Relief Fund.

"The Man Who Keeps His Head" by Harold Begbie (1871-1929) was published in Poems of the Great War in 1914 on behalf of The Prince of Wales' national Relief Fund. A reporter with the Daily Chronicle at the start of the war, Begbie wrote a number of recruiting poems and visited America to aid the recruitment effort there.

Written in 1914 by Owen Seaman, the poem "Pro Patria" is a call to arms to defend the righteous and noble values that England was deemed to represent. Calling upon God to support the coming actions of the war, based on a gallant national history, "Pro Patria" is an allusion to Horace and was also utilized in Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen.

The narrator pledges to donate 50% of his proceeds to The Royal British Legion Poppy Day Appeal - please support. The Fourth of August [1914] was the day that Britain entered into World War One. This poem by Laurence Binyon reminds the British public of their heroic past, and that the travails that lie ahead are justified by the righteous cause, and by following in the footsteps of those who fought before they will vanquish the foe.

This World War I poem by Henry Newbolt exhorts the British people to face the onset of war with the belief that God will defend their efforts in a righteous cause, exhorting the nation to “Pray that God defend the Right”. The Vigil was published in 1914, in “Poems of the Great War”, the net profits of which were donated to the Prince of Wales’ Fund.

Rudyard Kipling’s Gentlemen-Rankers first appeared in Barrack-Room Ballads and refers to young men of the privileged classes who may have suffered the indignity of bankruptcy or scandal, and joined the ‘rank-and-file’ of the British Army as privates.

This quintessentially English poem is in the form of a father’s advice to his son on transitioning into manhood. Phillip J. Mather’s masterful delivery poignantly captures Kipling’s inspirational and timeless philosophy.

Two women. Two stories. Two Wishes. Two outcomes. Life journeys often begin at the Wishing Bridge. A classic poem by a classic author. Narrated by Glenn Hascall.

Andrea Del Sarto (1836 - 1530) was a Florentine painter whose career flourished during the High Renaissance. In this dramatic monologue, "the faultless painter" (Andrea Senza Errori, as he was surnamed by the Italians) is the speaker. He addresses his unsympathetic wife, Lucrezia, upon whom he dotes, and for whom he has broken faith with his royal patron, Francis I of France so that he can meet the expenses of her indulgent lifestyle. He laments that he has not realized the possibilities of his genius, partly blaming and partly excusing the woman who has failed to support his high ideals.

James Elroy Flecker, linguist, scholar, critic, poet, and diplomat, like his illustrious poetic peers, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, did not survive the First World War. All three died young: Owen and Brooke in the line of battle, and Flecker, who never fought due to a long-standing respiratory illness, in a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1915. Flecker's poems are generally short: none of his original verse works exceeds 1200 words in length. Flecker revised his poems regularly, refining their spare but telling verbiage and achieving simplicity and directness.

Much of Tennyson's poetry is elegiac in nature, featuring characters who have been disempowered by isolation, age, or lack of opportunity. One of the most famous examples of this is the dramatic soliloquy, "Ulysses". "Columbus", written many years later, is also a dramatic narrative. In both cases, the narrators are elderly mariners, who have a long history of daring forays into remote regions, and who are eager to venture forth again but are hampered by lack of opportunity and the effects of aging.

This poem was composed in 1875 and 1876, but was not published until 1918. It is considered by many to be Hopkins' masterpiece. One hundred and sixty-eight passengers and crew died when the steamship Deutschland ran aground on the Kentish Knock. Hopkins weaves many Christian themes into his poetic retelling of the tragedy, including the inevitability of suffering, divine providence, salvation, and the hiddenness of God.

Award-winning audiobook narrator Mike Vendetti reads "Invictus". Politicians and authors love to quote the inspirational last two lines of this poem: "I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul."