Recordings of poets reading poems

[JasonPalmer]

i killed some spare time at the poetry library in the royal festival hall listening to betjeman reading his own poems, i didnt have my reading glasses with me,

was enjoyable, he gave some background info to some of the poems, i was using the computer but they also have an lp collection which made me wonder, do any of you have poets on lp,cd,tape reading poems ?

[smittims]

Argo used to do a splendid series of LPs of poets reading their own poems, on their PLP prefix. Some of these turn up in second-hand shops. I have Larkin's 'High Windows' and Stephen Spender, and I used to have C Day Lewis and others. I've seen CDs of Eliot and others. Eliot famously recorded 'Four Quartets' on 78s for HMV, sponsored by the British Council, soon after the poems were published. These have also been reissued on CD.
'

[Forget It (U2079353)]

Poem In Praise Of Limestone - read by WH Auden comes to mind . . .

https://soundcloud.com/user879202/poem-in-praise-of-limestone-read-by-wh-auden

As Seamus Heaney put it in 1978: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/...sounding-auden

I want to explore the relation between the kind of poetic authority which W.H. Auden sought and achieved and what
might be described as his poetic music. By ‘poetic authority’ I mean the rights and weight which accrue to a voice, not
only because of a sustained history of truth-telling, but by virtue also of its tonality, the sway it gains over the deep ear
and, through that, over other parts of our mind and nature. By ‘poetic music’ I mean the more or less describable effects
of language and form by which a certain tonality is effected and maintained.

[Pulcinella]

Dylan Thomas?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dylan-Thomas-Reading-His-Poetry/dp/0007179456/ref=sr_1_1?crid=38PYP2318QPR9&keywords=dylan+thomas+reading+his+poetry&qid=1692870316&sprefix=dylan+thomas+reading+his+poetry%2Caps%2C65&sr=8-1

[johncorrigan]

Dylan Thomas?

R.S.Thomas? I've got an old LP of him reading his poems. Not the cheeriest of souls..but I love listening to him.

https://youtu.be/bk7l9MmaTsQ?si=-pxM_R5Mty1RgcTv

[smittims]

RS Thomas certainly went 'against the grain' as a priest. In that job I think you have to be a 'people person' and he clearly wasn't. I wonder he stuck it for so long.
There's a fascinating chapter on him in 'The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory', a delightful 'oddball' book about writers who lived in rectories.

[gradus]

If you like a laugh try and listen to Ezra Pound intoning his verse whilst accompanying himself on timpani.

[Bella Kemp]

I remember that at school, studying The Waste Land, our teacher played us a recording of Eliot's reading this. His absurdly pompous - and, to our student ears, conceited - voice reduced us all to such giggles before our stern teacher that we literally had to slide down our chairs to try to hide. Many years later I went to a reading of the Four Quartets given by Gawain Douglas. This was very different and so greatly moving that by the end many of the audience were in tears.

[smittims]

I was very surprised to hear your description of Eliot's voice as absurdly pompous and conceited. I've always loved his readings and always felt his voice entirely natural.

[Bella Kemp]

I was very surprised to hear your description of Eliot's voice as absurdly pompous and conceited. I've always loved his readings and always felt his voice entirely natural.

Apologies - it was a long time ago and I was a child at the time. No doubt now it would be very different.

[smittims]

No need to apologise! I found it intersting that we hear different voices in different ways. I expect many young people today cannot listen to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau without feeling they sound stilted. Even Benjamin Britten's speaking voice now sounds almost impossibly 'lah-di-dah' to many.

The oldest recorded voices of poets, cylinders made by Edison of Tennyson and Browning, sound slightly 'Scottish' to me. I've even wondered if what we think of as a Scots accent is in fact how English sounded inte 19tth century.

[silvestrione]

Poem In Praise Of Limestone - read by WH Auden comes to mind . . .

https://soundcloud.com/user879202/poem-in-praise-of-limestone-read-by-wh-auden

As Seamus Heaney put it in 1978: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/...sounding-auden

Wow, that is profound...your Heaney quotation I mean, it's not showing in the post for some reason...Must re-read the whole essay later.