Human Voices Wake Us

Anthology: Visionary Poems from Yeats, Whitman, Blake & Myth (from the archive)


Listen Later

An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth:

  • W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming
  • T. S. Eliot: sections from The Waste Land and “East Coker
  • Walt Whitman: the first section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
  • William Wordsworth: from the thirteenth book of The Prelude
  • William Blake: from his long poem Milton
  • The first chapter of Ezekiel (from the JPS audio Tanakh)
  • A speech from Euripides’s Bacchae, tr. William Arrowsmith
  • Part of the eleventh book of the Bhagavad-Gita, tr. by Amit Majmudar in his Godsong
  • I close the episode with a reading that will not surprise long-time listeners.
  • You can support Human Voices Wake Us here, or by ordering any of my books: Notes from the GridTo the House of the SunThe Lonely Young & the Lonely Old, and Bone Antler Stone. I've also edited a handful of books in the S4N Pocket Poems series. Email me at  [email protected].

    ...more
    View all episodesView all episodes
    Download on the App Store

    Human Voices Wake UsBy Human Voices Wake Us