Robert Browning was fascinated by people—not only people of his own day, but also people who had lived in the remote past. Five of his famous dramatic monologues are spoken by characters from the ancient Classical world: a Greek goddess (Artemis), a Roman senator (in “Imperante Augusto Natus Est—”), an Arab physician (Karshish), a Greek poet (Cleon), and the last surviving eyewitness of Jesus Christ (in “A Death in the Desert”). They probe many different questions, especially regarding the...

In this streamlined, lightly modernized version of an ancient legend, Cupid, the eternal God of Love, himself falls in love with the human Psyche. The tale can be enjoyed at many levels: as an exciting adventure, a romantic love story, a mystical parable of humanity’s quest for union with the divine, an expression of the troubled Irish political situation in the early nineteenth century, and for the unfailing beauty and musicality of its verse. Originally issued only as an anonymous privat...

Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791–1864) was perhaps the most popular and influential American poet of her time. Deeply concerned with social injustices of all kinds, she was already speaking out against such problems as slavery, war, and the persistent mistreatment of Native Americans as early as the 1820s. She was equally at home in comedy and tragedy, and continued to publish with unabated zest and incisiveness for half a century. In all, she is estimated to have written over 2,000 poems.

L. E. L. was the pen-name of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838), a “wild and wayward girl” whose outspoken poems about love, hypocrisy, social injustice, religions, and death were discussed and debated avidly during her short life, but lost favor afterwards as Victorian notions of propriety became dominant. This wide-ranging collection includes 60 of her most characteristic poems.

Who was the bestselling English poet of the nineteenth century? No, not Tennyson or Byron or Wordsworth—but Felicia Hemans (1793–1835), “the most considerable woman poet of the Romantic period” and “the most notable British poet flourishing between the death of Byron and the rise of Tennyson and the Brownings” (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008). With an unfailing and seemingly effortless command of language, she voiced the deepest concerns of ordinary people, especial...

Butchers, bakers, brewers, businessmen, farmers, fabric workers, entertainers, comedians, gluttons, lechers, spongers and swindlers, prostitutes and parasites, the pope and his priests, the king and his courtiers, compete for attention in this lively and subversive vision of corruption in fourteenth-century England. The popular tale was altered, expanded, and imitated many times. This recording presents the initial two-dream Vision of Piers Plowman in its simplest and clearest for...

As he himself said, Drayton’s sonnets are the most “sportive” of the great Elizabethan love poems, “ever in motion,” by turns “wild, madding, jocund, and irregular,” yet maintaining a universality and sturdy good sense that have spoken to the hearts of hearers and readers for four centuries. This recording includes in full not only his famous final collection, Idea (1619), but also the earlier Idea’s Mirror (1594), as well as the various love sonnets that he wrote on other occasions.

Sixty-nine poems by six of the most admired women Romantic writers—English, Scottish, Irish, and American: Dorothy Wordsworth (William Wordsworth’s sister), Joanna Baillie, Eliza Townsend, Mary Tighe, Sara Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s daughter), and Caroline Bowles Southey. Each in her own way, they all broke with the poetic conventions of the past, writing in ordinary language about ordinary people, and approaching the traditional subjects of poetry with fresh eyes. Comedy and tra...

This collection includes favorite English-language poems by 178 favorite authors, beginning with Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke in Elizabethan times, and ending with T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore in the twentieth century. Cavaliers and Puritans, a famous king and a pilloried criminal, soulful lovers and sharp-witted satirists, Shakespeare and Jonson, Milton and Marvell, David Garrick and Rabindranath Tagore, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Christina Rossetti—all are here, in one ...