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.

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