The Caedmon Poetry Collection

A Century of Poets Reading Their Work

Harper Audio CD 2895(3)

CD 1:

1. The Song of the Old Mother

   William Butler Yeats

2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree

   William Butler Yeats

3. In Memory of W B Yeats

   W H Auden

4. A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

   Dylan Thomas

5. Fern Hill

   Dylan Thomas

6. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

   Dylan Thomas

7. The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible

   Galway Kinnell

8. Still Falls the Rain

   Edith Sitwell

9. The Speed of Darkness

   Murial Rukeyser

10. The DNA Molecule

    May Swenson

11. Poem to My Son

    Robert Graves

12. Eighth Air Force

    Randall Jarrell

13. To My God in His Sickness

    Philip Levine

14. Epistle to Be Left in the Earth

    Archibald MacLeish

15. The Last One

    W S Merwin

16. Divorce, Thy Name Is Woman

    Anne Sexton

17. Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman

    Anne Sexton

18. The Windy City

    Carl Sandburg

19. Fog

    Carl Sandburg

CD 2:

1. The Seafarer

   William Carlos Williams

2. darling! because my blood can sing

   e.e. cummings

3. if everything that happens can’t be done

   e.e. cummings

4. Nature Morte

   Joseph Brodsky

5. The Road Not Taken

   Robert Frost

6. After Apple-Picking

   Robert Frost

7. Omeros, Book 1, Chapter 1

   Derek Walcott

8. What Are Years

   Marianne Moore

9. Seascape

   Stephen Spender

10. Skunk Hour

    Robert Lowell

11. Teteléstai

    Conrad Aiken

12. If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso

    Gertrude Stein

13. Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

    Richard Wilbur

14. The Thin People

    Sylvia Plath

15. Sirocco

    Robert Penn Warren

16. American Portrait: Old Style

    Robert Penn Warren

CD 3:

1. Arte Poetica

   Pablo Neruda

2. Old Lovers at the Ballet

   May Sarton

3. The Groundhog

   Richard Eberhart

4. Litany for Dictatorships

   Stephen Vincent Benét

5. White Mane

   James Agee

6. Moeurs Contemporaines

   Ezra Pound

7. The Idea of Order at Key West

   Wallace Stephens

8. The Animals in That Country

   Margaret Atwood

9. The Wasteland [sic]

   T S Eliot

Because of Mr Patterson. I ordered a copy of this the instant I discovered that it closed with the recording of Eliot reading “The Waste Land” (listed as “The Wasteland” on this CD’s tracklist) which my high school Humanities teacher had played for us in the early 1980s, an unforgettable moment of education for me. For years I had thought it was Richard Burton doing the recitation; I don’t recall why I thought that, but I did. When my copy arrived soon after I ordered it, I immediately put on some headphones (I was at my office at the time) and ceased all other activity as I played CD 3, Track 9, and I was suddenly in that fantastic timeless place where real things exist.

The other tracks which I respond to are Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Stephen Spender’s “Seascape;” Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” I contemplate in memory of one who was a friend. Ezra Pound’s piece here doesn’t particularly reach me, but it’s interesting to hear his voice, and the same can be said of Gertrude Stein’s except that I actually do like to listen to hers…it’s a song, a strange song but a song nonetheless…and a fencing match…and brushstrokes….

But “The Waste Land” is what it’s all about, for me.

Then a damp gust
bringing rain

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Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.