The Poetry Album

A Collection of Works By Major Romantic and Victorian Poets

By: Audio Book Contractors

Narrated by: Flo Gibson

Length: 3 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Included in this collection are major works by Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, William Blake, Rupert Brooke, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Abraham Crowley, William Cooper, John Donne, Michael Drayton, John Dryden, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hardy, Robert Herrick, Thomas Gray, Ben Johnson, John Keats, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Raleigh, Christina Rossetti, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, Edmund Spenser, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and William Butler Yeats.

Public Domain (P)2007 Audio Book Contractors, LLC

Not easy to use

I downloaded this book to study for an exam I was having graduate school because listening to poetry makes it much more accessible for me and I was tired of reading them aloud myself. The narrator is fine, though she speaks faster than I would prefer for trying to really understand the lines and I had to slow down the delivery speed on my phone. However, that may not be a big deal for some people. The real problem I found was that there was no way to differentiate or find poets. There are over a dozen poets, each with multiple poems, but there is no contents list by poet, chapters are marked by time, and the only way to search is to know that they are listed in alphabetical order. I realize that you could take the time to go through all of them and bookmark what you wanted, but that was so time-consuming that I did not bother.

In summary, if you just wanted to listen to Romantic and Victorian poetry without worrying about the order they are in, separating the Romantics from the Victorians, or without any desire to find/listen to specific poems, then this audio is fine and you will probably like it. However, as someone who studies and teaches literature, I find that kind of blind linear progression to be neither helpful nor enjoyable and so it did not work for me.