Evocative, emotional, imaginative, personal, and powerful, these poems revolutionized the art form and still move and inspire us today.The best, most beloved poems by the six leading Romantic poets, performed by renowned British actors in top-quality studio productions. Listen as Douglas Hodge (Middlemarch), Derek Jacobi (Cadfael), Jeremy Northam (Gosford Park), Prunella Scales (An Ideal Husband), Nicol Williamson (Macbeth), and more read these lush, sensuous, rhythmic masterpieces.
William Blake: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright….” Includes Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, Poetical Sketches, a selection from The Rosetti Manuscript, more.
Lord Byron: Highlights from Don Juan, The Giaour, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, shorter lyrics such as “So we’ll go no more a roving” and “Fare thee well,” and more, linked by informative commentary.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree….” Includes “Kubla Khan,” “Frost at Midnight,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and more, all placed within the context of the poet’s life and times.
John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” selections from Endymion, and more.
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Excerpts from Prometheus Unbound, Queen Mab, and the autobiographical Epipsychidion, lyrical masterpieces “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark,” and more, linked and illuminated by commentary.
Williams Wordsworth: Selections from Lyrical Ballads; poems including “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” and “To a Sky-Lark;” and many more, with commentary.