Ancient Poetry

This amazing collection of poetry from the famous Greek Anthology spans over 1,500 years of ancient Greek and Byzantine history. The selections in this recording were chosen and translated by famed classicist J. W. Mackail.

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”—Los Angeles Times From the beloved, legendary poet...

Abordant les thèmes de la nature, de la vie et de la mort, la magnifique poésie de Paul Valéry invite le lecteur à l'introspection, à la découverte de son soi intérieur. Chacune de ses poésies, qu'elles soient longues ou courtes, font de ce recueil la marque de l'un de nos plus grands poètes.

The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, comprised the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. This carefully selected collection contains: The Odyssey ; The Works and Days ; Theogony ; The Complete Poems of Sappho ; Medea ; Antigone ; Agamemnon ; The Choephori ; Eumenides.

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world.

English literature is a treasure trove of wonderful poetry. From Shakespeare to Milton, Keats to Shelley and Tennyson to Yeats, this accessible history (especially written for Naxos Audiobooks) introduces the listener to countless small masterpieces, including all the old favorites and some lesser-known gems. Whitfield explores this most expressive of art forms and traces the historical development of a rich and diverse canon of poetical works.

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles. For nine long years, the armies of Greece have besieged the walls of Troy. But when a bitter quarrel erupts between King Agamemnon and Achilles, the greatest of all warriors, rage threatens to destroy the Greeks...

Le Moyen Âge : Thibault de Champagne, Guyot de Dijon, Eustache Deschamps, Guillaume Dufay, Charles d’Orléans, Rutebeuf et bien d'autres.

John Keats was largely unappreciated during his lifetime and died in Rome at the age of 26. Most of his 150 poems were written in just nine extraordinary months in 1819. This selection contains some of his finest works, including the principal "Odes", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Old Meg", and "Much Have I Travelled".

When God is hardened into a visible image, and worship reduced to a program, we remain exiled from what is truly sacred—the world around us and the “divine imagination” that created it. In this third volume of his Celtic wisdom trilogy, John O’Donohue immerses us in what has been called...

Charles Baudelaire is one of the greatest French poets. His most famous work, "Les Fleurs du Mal"("The Flowers of Evil"), was deemed scandalous at the time because of its themes of sex and death, lesbianism, corruption, wine, and the oppressiveness of living. The effect on fellow artists was "immense, prodigious, unexpected, mingled with admiration and with some indefinable anxious fear", while the regime of the Second Empire had Baudelaire prosecuted and fined for his "insult to public decency". Baudelaire's style had a tremendous influence on French poetry, and also on English writers; he was a pioneering translator, and created strong ties with the Anglo-Saxon literature.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's haunting ballad about guilt, punishment, and redemption. The poem follows a sailor who kills an albatross, bringing a curse upon his ship and crew. As terrible events unfold—stagnant seas, ghostly visions, and the death of his companions—the Mariner is forced to confront the consequences of his cruelty. Through suffering, he learns to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of all living things. Rich in vivid imagery and supernatural atmosphere, the poem explores themes of sin, nature, isolation, and spiritual awakening.

Mirabai was a Rajput princess born to the Rathore clan in 1498 in Kudaki, Rajasthan, in northern India. Despite being one of the most significant saints in the Bhakti tradition and an immensely popular Hindu mystic and religious poet, very few facts are actually known about her life including her date of birth. It is clear that her mother died when she was very young and she was greatly influenced by her father, also a worshipper of Krishna. From a young age, Mirabai’s devotion to Krishna was absolute surrender and complete devotion.

An undeniable masterpiece of Western Civilization, The Metamorphoses is a continuous narrative that covers all the Olympian legends, seamlessly moving from one story to another in a splendid panorama of savage beauty, charm, and wit. All of the gods and heroes familiar to us are represented. Such familiar legends as Hercules, Perseus and Medusa, Daedelus and Icarus, Diana and Actaeon, and many others, are breathtakingly recreated.

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid) is best known for his epic poem Metamorphoses, a collection of myths and legends from Ancient Greece and Rome. His works continue to be widely read and admired, and he is regarded as one of the most significant poets of ancient Rome. Ovid’s love poems are both brilliant and evocative. In Amores, the romantic mysteriousness of elegiac love-poetry is exploded by his witty and ironic treatment of the form. Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris both lay down the rules for the game of love, which both sexes can play.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in collaboration with his friend, William Wordsworth, revolutionized English poetry. In 1798 they produced their Lyrical Ballads, poems of imagination and reflection using "the language of men" - pointing the way forward for a generation of Romantic poets.

The ancient Greeks revered Homer and Hesiod and often cited their names together in theological and theological works. While the two could have been contemporaries, some estimate that Hesiod lived up to 100 years after Homer. Sappho was an ancient Greek poetess and musician. She pioneered song lyrics and the ancient Greeks included her in the canon of nine lyric poets. Plato even numbered her among the Parnassian goddesses, referring to her as the tenth muse.

Enheduanna, also known as En-hedu-ana or Enheduana, is widely regarded as the world's first known author and poet, as well as one of the earliest recorded female figures in history. She lived in ancient Mesopotamia during the 23rd century BCE, and held the esteemed position of high priestess in the city of Ur, which was a thriving center of Sumerian civilization.

Il a suffi à Stéphane Mallarmé de quelques poèmes pour remettre en question l'objet même de la littérature. Avec lui naquit un vers nouveau : souvent remaniés des dizaines de fois, ses poèmes sont un travail d'orfèvre, pour lequel il soupèse chaque mot, le contemple sous toutes ses faces et dans sa transparence, dans le jeu de tous ses reflets, jusqu'à obtenir un bijou textuel dont l'essence est un plaisir musical et sensuel plutôt que l'évocation d'objets réels. Sans Mallarmé, pas de modernité poétique. Découvrez ou redécouvrez Mallarmé au travers de ses meilleurs textes ; on leur reproche souvent leur difficulté, mais la clarté de l'interprétation de Florence Alayrac permet d'en savourer tout le plaisir.

Paul Verlaine est l'auteur d'une poésie empreinte du romantisme du XIXème siècle, mais dégageant déjà une originalité qui fera de lui l'un des initiateurs du symbolisme. Sa poésie, entre ombre et lumière, aux vers parfois torturés, s'inspire notamment d'une vie agitée par sa passion pour Arthur Rimbaud.