Several readers of my Yeats review have asked about the Classic FM (a London
serious-music radio station) recording of their readers’ 100 favorite poems.
How can they get it? Well, Amazon UK lists it in both audio tape and CD
format. Here’s the CD.
Notice that it’s a heck of a lead time on delivery, though.
Note also, before you buy, that the collection is very British. The top 10
of the 100 are:
1—Daffodils (Wordsworth)
2—If (Kipling)
3—The Listeners (de la Mare)
4—Home-Thoughts from Abroad (Browning)
5—Lady of Shalott (Tennyson)
6—Cargoes (Masefield)
7—To Autumn (Keats)
8—The Soldier (Brooke)
9—Remember (Rossetti)
10–Sea Fever (Masefield)
Rupert Brooke & John Masefield are barely known over here (though Jay
Nordlinger knows “Sea Fever,” I found out by chance over dinner recently),
and I think Walter de la Mare is perfectly unknown. Browning doesn’t loom
very large here, either, though I spotted a deft Browning allusion (“too
soon made glad”) in one of Bill Safire’s columns a couple of weeks ago.
Some public-spirited US radio station should do a collection for American