This lit­tle col­lec­tion gives you access to Wal­lace Stevens (1879–1955), one of Amer­i­ca’s great poets, read­ing his own poet­ry. Among the poems, you will hear “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Poem that Took the Place of a Moun­tain,” “Vacan­cy in the Park,” and “To an Old Philoso­pher in Rome.” For more, you should see our pre­vi­ous post, Lis­ten­ing to Famous Poets Read­ing Their Own Work, and then below watch the clip below of ever-pro­lif­ic Yale lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor Harold Bloom recit­ing Stevens’ “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.”

Por­trait of William But­ler Yeats by John Singer Sar­gent, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It’s a hap­py trend. Increas­ing­ly, we’re see­ing muse­ums launch­ing dynam­ic online exhi­bi­tions to accom­pa­ny their exhi­bi­tions on the ground. In the past, we high­light­ed the Tate Mod­ern’s panoram­ic tour of Mark Rothko’s work. And now we point you to The Life and Work of William But­ler Yeats, an online exhi­bi­tion cre­at­ed by The Nation­al Library of Ire­land. When you enter the tour, you can scan through 200 arti­facts & man­u­scripts and “attend” three in-depth tuto­ri­als explor­ing the evo­lu­tion of three major poems (‘Sail­ing to Byzan­tium’, ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘Nine­teen Hun­dred and Nine­teen’). You can also lis­ten to Yeats, one of Ire­land’s tow­er­ing poets, recit­ing his famous poem ‘The Lake Isle of Inn­is­free.’ To lis­ten, click “Areas” on the bot­tom nav­i­ga­tion, then click “Verse and Vision” on the cen­ter menu, and then the audio will begin to play. You can read the text of the poem here. Final­ly, you’ll find more Yeats poems in our Free Audio Book col­lec­tion.

The poem was W.H. Auden’s. The date marked the moment when Ger­many invad­ed Poland, ini­ti­at­ing the start of World War II. “Sep­tem­ber 1, 1939” was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in The New Repub­lic on Octo­ber 18, 1939. You can find the text of the poem here. Plus, you can also read George Orwell’s account of what hap­pened that his­toric day in Poland. I found it, and just had to throw that in.

Appar­ent­ly, this is “an authen­tic wax cylin­der record­ing of Whit­man read­ing from his late poem ‘Amer­i­ca’ that appeared in 1888 …”