Download and listen to this series of MP3s from the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Out Loud program. This audio guide features some of the most famous poems of all time read by distinguished actors and writers.
The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation have partnered with State Arts Agencies of the United States to support the expansion of Poetry Out Loud, which encourages the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and performance.
MP3 Track Listing:
1 Introduction
2 The power of poetry
By Dana Gioia
3 "Jenny Kiss'd Me"
by Leigh Hunt
Read by Kay Ryan
4 "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
by William Butler Yeats
Read by Anthony Hopkins
5 "We Wear the Mask"
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Read by Rita Dove
6 "Fire and Ice"
by Robert Frost
Read by N. Scott Momaday
7 "The Good-Morrow"
by John Donne
Read by David Mason
8 "Jabberwocky"
by Lewis Carroll
Read by David Schwimmer
9 "anyone lived in a pretty how town"
by E. E. Cummings
Read by David Mason
10 "Pied Beauty"
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Read by Kay Ryan
11 Conveying emotion, with excerpts from Hamlet
12 "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
by Dylan Thomas
Read by Alfred Molina
13 "The World Is Too Much with Us"
by William Wordsworth
Read by Angela Lansbury
14 "Fern Hill"
by Dylan Thomas
Read by Anthony Hopkins
15 Punching words
16 "Ozymandias"
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Read by N. Scott Momaday
17 Kay Ryan remembers her grandmother
19 N. Scott Momaday remembers his parents
20 David Mason on knowing poems by heart
21 "Hope is the thing with feathers"
by Emily Dickinson
Read by David Henry Hwang
22 "When You Are Old"
by William Butler Yeats
Read by Diane Thiel
23 "The Road Not Taken"
by Robert Frost
Read by Dana Gioia
24 Sonnet 55
by William Shakespeare
Read by James Earl Jones
25 "When I Have Fears"
by John Keats
Read by Rita Dove
26 "To My Dear and Loving Husband"
by Anne Bradstreet
Read by Alyssa Milano
27 "I think I should have loved you presently"
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Read by Alyssa Milano
28 "Dream Deferred (Harlem)"
by Langston Hughes
Read by Khandi Alexander
29 "I Hear America Singing"
by Walt Whitman
Read by Richard Rodriguez
30 From "Annabel Lee"
by Edgar Allan Poe
Read by Khandi Alexander
31 "The Unknown Citizen"
by W. H. Auden
Read by Alfred Molina
32 "Miniver Cheevy"
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Read by David Mason
33 "My Last Duchess"
by Robert Browning
Read by Alfred Molina
34 "Dover Beach"
by Matthew Arnold
Read by Angela Lansbury
35 "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
by Wallace Stevens
Read by N. Scott Momaday
36 "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died"
by Emily Dickinson
Read by Kay Ryan
37 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
by T. S. Eliot
Read by Anthony Hopkins
38 Credits