For our recording TEN THOUSAND STARS, I set out to read aloud thrilling, engaging poetry for listeners from middle school age through adults. Covering a tremendous assortment from three centuries and three continents, the recording presents works by, and tells the stories of, master poets from the U.S., England, Wales, India and Ireland.
Listen to short poetic bursts ranging from Emily Dickinson’s pointed observations, through William Butler Yeats’ rhapsodic “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”, to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s modern classic in four lines, “First Fig." In longer works, Alfred Noyes’s thrilling “The Highwayman” thunders up his moonlit road here, Samuel Butler Coleridge takes us on a vivid tour of Kubla Khan’s exotic Xanadu, and Stephen Vincent Benet immerses us in the opening of the American frontier in “The Ballad of William Sycamore”.
Seekers of inspiration will find it in William Henley’s masterpiece, “Invictus” and Rudyard Kipling’s massively popular “If”.
Special sections explore favorite poetic movements. In sections on American poetry, Longfellow and Emerson bring the Nineteenth Century to vivid life, while, from the Twentieth Century, Robert Frost reflects on “The Road Not Taken”, Paul Laurence Dunbar comments on the need for racial justice, and Emma Lazarus offers welcoming words to be placed at the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor…”).
The British Romantics are here, too: Blake’s “Tyger” roars, Wordsworth and Lord Byron reveal beauty in nature and in the human heart, and Shelley reflects on the meaning of true greatness in his classic, “Ozymandias”.
I believe the words and topics on this recording (the 2nd in our "Cornucopia of Best-Loved Poems" series) will captivate almost any listener and foster the desire to explore more great poetry. So let TEN THOUSAND STARS shine for you!
