Publisher Description
AMERICA – The Poetry Of – An Introduction. Poetry can sometimes be elusive, the real meaning layered beneath another. In this volume American Poets give voice to their Nation, their hopes and aspirations. Whitman, Emerson and Dickinson are joined by Poe, Holmes, Dunbar and others to pleasure our ears and minds with a rambling stroll through their works. It doesn’t define America but it captures her mood and flavours her soul of these early times in the American dream.
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About the Authors
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager, he became quite well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a singer. When he was fourteen, he set off for the capital, Copenhagen, determined to become a national success on the stage. He failed miserably, but made some influential friends in the capital who got him into school to remedy his lack of proper education. In 1829 his first book was published. After that, books came out at regular intervals. His stories began to be translated into English as early as 1846. Since then, numerous editions, and more recently Hollywood songs and Disney cartoons, have helped to ensure the continuing popularity of the stories in the English-speaking world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a renowned lecturer and writer whose ideas on philosophy, religion, and literature influenced many writers, including Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. After an undergraduate career at Harvard, he studied at Harvard Divinity School and became an ordained minister. He led the transcendentalist movement in America in the mid-nineteenth century. He is perhaps most well known for his publications Essays and Nature.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular and admired American poet of the nineteenth century. Known for his narrative historical and mythic poems, his most famous works include Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Tales of Wayside Inn. Versatile as well as prolific, Longfellow also won fame as a writer of
short ballads and lyrics, and experimented in the essay, the short
story, the novel, and the verse drama.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1848) transformed the American literary landscape with his innovations in the short story genre and his haunting lyrical poetry, and he is credited with inventing American gothic horror and detective fiction. He was first published in 1827 and then began a career as a magazine writer and editor and a sharp literary critic. In 1845 the publication of his most famous poem, “The Raven,” brought him national fame.
About the Narrators
James Langton, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.
William Hootkins (1948-2005) was an American character actor, most famous for supporting roles in blockbusters such as Star Wars, Batman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Hardware. He trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and appeared on stage at the Royal Court Theatre and in the West End. William was also a voice-over artist and recorded dozens of plays for the BBC and narrated works by Jack London, Robert Bloch, and Carl Hiaasen for audiobooks. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2005.
William Dufris attended the University of Southern Maine in Portland-Gorham before pursuing a career in voice work in London and then the United States. He has won more than twenty AudioFile Earphones Awards, was voted one of the Best Voices at the End of the Century by AudioFile magazine, and won the prestigious Audie Award in 2012 for best nonfiction narration. He lives with his family in Maine.
Ghizela Rowe has worked in broadcast
television for thirty years on a broad range of programming. Her specialization
is in music. She helps run the Copyright Group, an extensive collection of
master recording rights, and has lent her voice to many audiobooks, including The Poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Elizabeth Gaskell: The Short Stories, and The Romantics: An Introduction.