The office of poet laureate is a high honor among poets. The honor was first present among the ancient Greeks, whose heroes and poets wore wreaths of laurel in honor of the god Apollo.
Unfortunately no single definitive record exists of the office of Poet Laureate of England. In some form it can be traced back to 1189 and Richard Canonicus, who was employed by Richard I with the title "Versificator Regis." It is said that Geoffrey Chaucer was called poet laureate, being granted in 1389 an annual allowance of wine. However, it is not until 1617 that King James I created the post as it is known today for Ben Jonson, although it appears not to have been a formal appointment. That formality—the title of Poet Laureate as a royal office—was first conferred by letters patent on John Dryden in 1670.
From there we have procession of outstanding writers, among them William Wordsworth, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Alfred Austin, and Edmund Spenser. Collected here, in this second volume, are further works by these great poets.
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William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an influential English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age of English literature with the 1798 joint publication of Lyrical Ballads. He was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Scott Brick, an acclaimed voice artist, screenwriter, and actor, has performed on film, television, and radio. He attended UCLA and spent ten years in a traveling Shakespeare company. Passionate about the spoken word, he has narrated a wide variety of audiobooks. winning won more than fifty AudioFile Earphones Awards and several of the prestigious Audie Awards. He was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine and the Voice of Choice for 2016 by Booklist magazine.
Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.