A celebration of English poems

Read by Richard Mitchley, Ghizela Rowe & David Shaw-Parker (Unabridged: 1hr 52mins)

Featuring poems by William Blake, John Keats, John Donne & many more

Poetry. A form of words that seems so elegantly simple in one verse and so cleverly complex in another.  Each poet has a particular style, an individual and unique way with words and yet each of us seems to recognise the path and destination of where the verses lead, even if sometimes the full comprehension may be a little beyond us.

Through the centuries every culture has produced verse to symbolize and to describe everything from everyday life, natural wonders, the human condition and even in its more hubristic moments, the crushing triumph of an enemy.

In the volumes of this series, we take a look at poetry through the prism of individual regions of England, or sometimes more quaintly known as ‘Albion’, or ‘Blighty’, through the centuries of its gloried history.

England, despite its perception of reserve and under-statement has, in reality, strode the global stage at various time in many things, both good and bad, from Empire to long distance running. Here our focus in on its literature.  Famed for its fiction and dramas, it is equally admired for its plethora of gifted poets and the dazzling verse which has added so much to its artistic legacy.  These classic poets are wonders of their age and of their art.  Genius is written in their names.

In this volume we have collected verse from poets born in the East of England.  These flat lowlands face out towards Europe yet within their counties are centuries of poetical history that indelibly mark out their talents as among our very best.

In this compilation -

1 - Born in England - Exploring English Poetry - London - An Introduction

2 - The Reeve's Tale - An Extract by Geoffrey Chaucer

3 - The Tyger by William Blake

4 - La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

5 - To His Mistress Going to Bed by John Donne

6 - Darkness by Lord Byron

7 - My Love is Like to Ice by Edmund Spenser

8 - A Fit of Rhyme Against Rhyme by Ben Jonson

9 - Sonnet VII - How Soon Hath Time The Subtle Thief of Youth by John Milton

10 - Dreamland by Christina Rossetti

11 - Farewell to London in the Year 1715 by Alexander Pope

12 - The Jumblies by Edward Lear

13 - My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

14 - Ode To The Moon by Thomas Hood

15 - The True Born Englishman by Daniel Defoe

16 - The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew

17 - Wine and Water by G K Chesterton

18 - Ode on the Spring by Thomas Gray

19 - Love and Folly by Charlotte Smith

20 - The Glory by Edward Thomas

21 - The Message of the March Wind by William Morris

22 - Night by John Ruskin

23 - Silent Noon by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

24 - Love and Hate by Elizabeth Siddal

25 - Four Songs For Four Seasons by Algernon Charles Swinburne

26 - To A Poet by Alice Meynell

27 - Hop Picking by Edith Nesbit

28 - Scenes In London IV - The City Churchyard by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

29 - Thiepval Wood by Edmund Blunden

30 - The Suicide's Grave by W S Gilbert

31 - The Life of Man by Sir Francis Bacon

32 - Wishes of an Elderly Man Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914 by Walter Alexander Raleigh

33 - When My Love Did What I Would Not by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

34 - The Volunteer by Herbert Asquith

35 - His Return to London by Robert Herrick

36 - From Piccadilly in August by John Freeman

37 - London Poets by Amy Levy

38 - A Poet Unknown by Ernest Rhys

39 - Cherry-Ripe by Thomas Campion

40 - The Female Philosopher by Charlotte Dacre

41 - Your Strange Hair by Renee Vivien

42 - I Serve A Mistress by Anthony Munday

43 - A Supplication by Abraham Cowley

44 - The Flaming Heart by Richard Crashaw

45 - How Near I Am to Happiness by Thomas Middleton

46 - A Night Rain In Summer by James Henry Leigh Hunt

47 - Sonnet XIV by Mary Wroth

48 - Hot Sun Cool Fire by George Peele

49 - Yet Might She Love Me by Thomas Kyd

50 - Formosae Puellae by Herbert P Horne

51 - Now That You Too by Eleanor Farjeon

52 - Written in July by Samuel Rogers

53 - I Leave Thee for a While by Eliza Cook

54 - On the Death of Princess Borghese, At Rome, November 1840 by Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton

55 - The Sad Day by Thomas Flatman

56 - A Football Player by E C Lefroy

57 - February by Louisa Sarah Bevington

58 - The Earth, Late Chok'd with Showers by Thomas Lodge

59 - February by Dollie Radford

60 - To Mrs Jane Forster, On Her Birthday, August 4th 1724 by Henry Baker

61 - An August Evening, 1865 by Carolyn Clive

62 - October by John Payne

63 - The Little London Girl by Kate Greenaway

64 - On My Leaving London, June the 29th by Sarah Fyge-Egerton

65 - Lines Written in London by Frances Anne kemble

66 - London, My Beautiful by F S Flint

67 - Philomel in London by Edmund William Gosse

68 - The Blind Boy by Colley Cibber

69 - The Orphan by Ann Taylor

70 - The Twins by Henry Sambrooke Leigh

71 - The Mother by May Herschel-Clarke

72 - Poverty by Jane Taylor

73 - Munition Wages by Madeline Ida Bedford

74 - The Slavery of Greece by George Canning

75 - The Vampiress by Lord Lytton

76 - The Glories of Our Blood and State by James Shirley

77 - Verdun by Eden Phillpotts

78 - 4th July 1882, Malines, Midnight by James Kenneth Stephen

79 - Over the Top by Sybil Bristowe

80 - The Dawn Patrol by Paul Bewsher

81 - Into Battle by Julian Grenfell

82 - Hymn After Battle by Arthur St John Adcock

83 - The Rainbow by Leslie Coulson

84 - Marching Men by Marjorie Pickthall

85 - A Cross in Flanders by G Rostrevor Hamilton

86 - The Deserter by Gilbert Frankau

87 - To Our Fallen by Robert Ernest Vernede

88 - The Shell by H Smalley Sarson

89 - Zeppliins by Nancy Cunard

90 - The Flying Fish by John Gray

91 - To the Doubtful Reader by Amelia Lanyer

92 - Shakespeare. An Ode for His Three-Hundreth Birthday by Martin Farquhar Tupper