The Poetry of August: A Month in Verse Audiobook

About the Authors

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.

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.

Henry Alford is the author of six books, including And Then We Danced, How to Live, and Big Kiss, an account of his attempts to become a working actor, which won a Thurber Prize. As a journalist, he has written for the New Yorker for more than two decades and is a former columnist for the New York Times and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), English poet, dramatist, and novelist, was born on the Egdon Heath in Dorset. He studied in Dorchester and apprenticed to an architect before leaving for London, where he began to write. Unable to find a public for his poetry, which idealized the rural life, he turned to the novel and met with success as well as controversy. The strong public reaction against some of his darker themes turned him back to writing verse. Today several of his novels are considered masterpieces of tragedy.

About the Narrators

Richard Mitchley is an actor and narrator who has appeared in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet…, The Black Adder, and Doctor Who. 

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.