A Little History of Poetry cover art

A Little History of Poetry

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Thousands of incredible audiobooks and podcasts to take wherever you go.
Immerse yourself in a world of storytelling with the Plus Catalogue - unlimited listening to thousands of select audiobooks, podcasts and Audible Originals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

A Little History of Poetry

By: John Carey
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

The Bookseller (UK) Editor's Choice

A vital, engaging, and hugely enjoyable guide to poetry, from ancient times to the present, by one of our greatest champions of literature

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not.

John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem “great” in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world’s poems - and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

©2020 John Carey (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing Collections & Anthologies Literary History & Criticism Poetry English Poetry

Listeners also enjoyed...

 A Little History of Art cover art
The History of English Poetry cover art
The Adventure of English cover art
The Nation's Favourite Poems cover art
Metamorphoses cover art
All the Sonnets of Shakespeare cover art
Hamlet cover art
Ode to a Nightingale cover art
The Eve of St. Agnes cover art
The Mirror of My Heart cover art
Mad About Shakespeare cover art
Lamia cover art
A Woman of No Importance cover art
The Bright Book of Life cover art
The Truth and Beauty cover art
Possessed by Memory cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
An enjoyable race through (mostly) English poetry. I'd have preferred more quotations though. Something of a menu to make you start reading the poets in depth...

recommended

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Nothing too fancy, but short chapters give a clear account of the great poets of different periods and movements.

As that great poet Ron Seal famously put it "It does. What it says. On the tin."

A good little poetry primer

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I don't have any specific complain. This content is probably not best in audiobook format. I'll try it as a reading book some day. For now, I didn't finish it.

Not for audiobooks

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An absolutely wonderful book, well written and well read. Will listen again. And again, probably

Brilliant.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
very well narrated book. Good balance of quotations and facts, coupled with a fair perspective and opinion.

Great read through

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This audio-book is spread so widely and thinly it becomes transparent.
There is no cohesive narrative. The content is a name-checking exercise with occasional quotes and an abundance of irritating date references. It is carefully edited to ensure full compliance with the woke movement.
A final moan; Oscar Wilde is described as a British poet. This grated. He was born in Dublin (Ireland). He is an Irish writer. The British may have claimed the boxer Barry McGuigan, but they are not getting Oscar as well.

Name Checking Exercise

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.