Poetry audiobooks

Great Goddesses

By: Nikita Gill

Narrated by: Nikita Gill

Length: 4 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Bestselling poet, writer, and Instagram sensation Nikita Gill returns with a collection of poetry and prose retelling the legends of the Goddesses, both great and small, in their own words.

With lyrical prose and striking verse, beloved poet Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales, Wild Embers) uses the history of Ancient Greece and beyond to explore and... Read more

Between You and These Bones

By: F. D. Soul

Narrated by: F. D. Soul

Length: 1 hour 20 minutes

Abridged: No

An intimate and lovely reading by the author herself, Between You and These Bones will bring you wonder and peace just by listening.

From celebrated New Zealand poetess F.D. Soul comes her highly anticipated second collection of poetry, prose, illustrations, and wisdom. Her messages grapple with relationships: interpersonal relationships, her... Read more

Felon

By: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Narrated by: Reginald Dwayne Betts

Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

Abridged: No

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (New York Times).

Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems― canvassing his wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace― and, in doing so,... Read more

Charnel Rose

By: Conrad Aiken

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

In Earth Triumphant, Conrad Aiken's first major book of poetry, he took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old human spirit sees that time has passed and death is coming, where does that spirit find... Read more

Earth Triumphant

By: Conrad Aiken

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 3 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

In Charnel Rose, Conrad Aiken takes the plunge into a deeply metaphysical and surrealistic world, capturing the essence of one aspect of quintessential humanity: how we create and pursue a deeply personal, intensely idealistic, physically and emotionally draining search for love, and how some of us turn away from real love when we do find it,... Read more

Nocturne of Remembered Spring

By: Conrad Aiken

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

What Spoon River Anthology does for a Midwestern small town, Turns and Movies does for the world of vaudeville. Like Masters, like Aiken: passions, betrayals, secrets, sins, victories, defeats, and inevitable losing struggles against age and death are the stuff of this work. And that's only the first part of the book.
The rest of the book... Read more

Turns and Movies

By: Conrad Aiken

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Conrad Aiken was fascinated throughout his early work with the image of a tempestuous, romantic young man who tears himself away from his wife, his first love, and from a pastoral, peaceful life in a rural setting, to pursue what he hopes will be a richer, fuller, more rewarding life in a great city. In this book, Aiken explores this theme in... Read more

Avon's Harvest

By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 22 minutes

Abridged: No

"In ""Avon's Harvest,"" Edwin Arlington Robinson devotes the majority of the book to one long narrative poem of the same title, which tells the story of how a man's life was destroyed by the slow canker of an unreasoning hatred he formed as a young man, and of a sudden act of violence that flared out of it. Robinson's wields his sparse, simple,... Read more

Captain Craig

By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 3 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

"In 1921, Edwin Arlington Robinson was only 52 and many of the pieces in his Collected Poems were written long before that. Yet he shows gifted understanding of old age, the passage of time, the slow decline that everyone must suffer, and the final cease and release of death. Isaac, in Isaac and Archibald, puts it very well to the poet's... Read more

The Children of the Night

By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 3 minutes

Abridged: No

"Children of the Night, from 1897, is Edwin Arlington Robinson's second book of poetry. He self-published his first book, The Torrent And The Night Before, in 1896; most of the poems in it also appear in this volume. This book already contains one poem destined to become known as one of his masterpieces, namely the famous portrait of a suicide,... Read more

Lancelot

By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

"The beautiful, elegant, hearbreakingly sad story of Lancelot, Guinevere and Arthur is Ediwn Arlington Robinson's subject in his 1920 novella in verse, ""Lancelot."" His focus throughout is is on one side of the triangle, that of Lancelot and Guinevere. As in his previous Arthurian poem, ""Merlin,"" he does not give us Malory's tales of jousts... Read more

The Man Against the Sky

By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 43 minutes

Abridged: No

"In The Man Against The Sky, Edwin Arlington Robinson presents us with a gallery of characters drawn from the streets, homes and gathering places of Tilbury Town, his fictional Northeastern dwelling place. A mysterious compelling stranger, a woman living on charity, a welcoming home - this and other portraits give us a compelling and perceptive... Read more

Merlin

By: Edwin Arlington Robinson

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

"In ""Merlin,"" Edwin Arlington Robinson delves into the minds and hearts of a gallery of characters from the story Camelot: Gawaine, Bedivere, Lamorak; Arthur himself; his fool, Sir Dagonet, and most importantly, Merlin himself and the woman he loves, Vivian. He places the action at the moment when Guinevere and Lancelot have fled to Joyeux... Read more

Fugitive Pieces

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 12 minutes

Abridged: No

George Gordon, later Lord Byron, published Fugitive Pieces in 1806 when he was only 18 years old. It was printed, but Byron's friends - particularly Reverend Thomas Beecher - advised him that it contained poems that were scandalously amorous, particularly the poem To Mary. Byron suppressed it by having all the copies destroyed - or so he... Read more

Hours of Idleness

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

For those who love Byron’s poetry, the value of this work is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come. It is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic heart and soul goes about fashioning itself.Though a young man, he often writes as if he were old, musing on... Read more

Early Poems

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 15 minutes

Abridged: No

As in the first two volumes of this series, our interest in these poems is not so much the poetry itself as the promise of what is to come. In these poems, mostly written in the years just before Byron left England to tour in Europe, it is fascinating to see how his power as a poet is constantly growing and to see how his enormously romantic... Read more

The Satires

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 3 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

In this, the fourth volume of this series, we hear the poetry in which Byron began to make his mark on the world. Though his major breakthrough with Childe Harold is yet to come, his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers was a definite hit in its time, establishing Byron as a known poet and ensuring that his reputation as a literary bad-boy was off... Read more

Hebrew Melodies and Other Poems

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 4 hours 37 minutes

Abridged: No

This volume of Lord Byron’s poetry contains four sets of his poems, starting with his famous book of poetry, Hebrew Melodies, and continuing with the Poems of the Separation, poetry he wrote in the period 1816-1823, his Jeux d’Esprit, and a group of poems written in homage to the great poets of Italy. Hebrew Melodies is a collection of lyrics... Read more

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 57 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the book that made Lord Byron (George Gordon) famous. He was a published and a known poet, but until this book took the English-speaking world by storm in 1812, he was not a famous poet. Byron was, however, a celebrity. As an aristocrat whose personal life was considered shockingly scandalous - and even today would be good stuff for... Read more

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 2 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

With Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos III and IV, Byron comes to the high point of his work and to clear and definite mastery of his art as a poet. Though he himself doubts his powers - he says his visions no longer swim so palpably before his eyes as once they did - his visions are far more palpable to us, expressed as they are with the full... Read more

Occasional Pieces

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Abridged: No

This volume of the Freshwater Seas Lord Byron set consists of 54 poems written during the years 1809-1816. Many were included in various editions of longer works, particularly the 1812 and later editions of Childe Harold; others were published in various newspapers and periodicals, especially the Morning Chronicle; a few were not published until... Read more

Turkish Tales

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

We hope you will enjoy these fine, old-fashioned stories that Lord Byron wrote in an old-fashioned way. He tells these tales in rhyming verse and heroic couplets, and he makes them dashing, romantic, and even melodramatic in a way that has become foreign to us with the passing of time. These are tales of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish empire... Read more

The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 5 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

This volume of The Poetry of Lord Byron is focused on work in which Byron dealt with certain themes that recurred throughout his career, especially personal integrity in the search for freedom and for love, and the suffering that can go with that search. The Prisoner of Chillon, the keynote piece of this volume, is one of Byron’s most riveting... Read more

Don Juan

By: Lord Byron

Narrated by: Robert Bethune

Length: 13 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

The best way to appreciate this long and fascinating poem, really a novel in verse, is to just let it wash over you. Don't try to get caught up in the story, for Byron won't let you do that; don't try to figure it out, for Byron doesn't want you to do that either. Just listen to the man converse with you and enjoy his playful talk - that's why... Read more