Poetry

Articles in this section

• "Tintern Abbey" (1798) by William Wordsworth - the original and most authentic text

  20 November 2013 by William Wordsworth

  This poem is arguably the greatest lyrical poem in the English language.
  It was first published in 1798 in what is probably the most famous book of poetry in the language: Lyrical Ballads, which, in addition to ground-breaking works by Wordsworth exploring the speech and the social situation (...)

• Thoughts on reading "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", translated by Edward Fitzgerald

  20 February 2006 by Ray

  One is first and foremost captivated by the sheer lyrical beauty of the poem, from the first of the seventy-five quatrains (or rubaiyats):
  - 1 - Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s (...)

• An anthology of great English Poems

  31 January 2006 by Ray

  Although the criteria for inclusion in this anthology are personal, they are nevertheless quite straightforward: the poems have to approach that superior and very rare level of excellence and poetic power epitomized for me by Wordsworth’s sublime Tintern Abbey, by Coleridge’s epic The Rime of the (...)

• Poetry Readings

  15 January 2006 by Ray

  For those who are looking for something new to listen to : how about some of the greatest poems ever written in English? click here to see the complete texts of all of these poems. 24.09.2010: reactivated with modified Adobe Flash Player presentation.
  William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Sonnet (...)

• Petite anthologie de la poésie chinoise de la dynastie Tang (618-907 AD)

  1 December 2005 by Ray

  La dynastie Tang (618-907 AD), et en particulier l’ère Xuanzong de 712-756, a été une période d’épanouissement extraordinaire de la civilisation chinoise dans tous les domaines, et notamment dans l’art et la littérature. Aucune autre civilisation n’a jamais autant prisé la poésie : les poètes étaient (...)