Here’s a quick little find for the poetry lover: A slew of early poems by Wallace Stevens, the great American poet, can now be downloaded as podcasts (iTunes). They include many classics — Anecdote of the Jar, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, and many others. Recorded for LibriVox by Alan Drake, all poems are in the public domain.
Speaking of Wallace Stevens, you may want to give a listen to a podcast that we highlighted here once before. It features the great literary critic Harold Bloom (see bio) teaching a seminar at Yale on “The Art of Reading a Poem” (iTunes — mp3). Here, Bloom takes his students through a poem by Wallace Stevens, Parts of a World,and moves between interpretation and intriguing personal anecdotes. If you want to hear a master at work, give a good listen.
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