Poetry

In this brilliant conclusion to his best-selling Mythos trilogy, legendary author and actor Stephen Fry retells the tale of the Trojan War....

The epic grandeur of Dante's masterpiece has inspired readers and listeners for 700 years and has entered the human imagination....

Dating to the ninth century BC, Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War....

Little is known about the Ancient Greek oral poet Homer, the supposed 8th century BC author of the world-read Iliad and his later masterpiece, The Odyssey....

The oldest long poem in Old English, written about AD 1,000, Beowulf tells the story of a great warrior of southern Scandinavia, in both youth and maturity....

John Lithgow has compiled an outstanding collection of memorable poems and has gathered his famous friends to read them....

This book is an exploration of the wisdom in the Viking Age poem "Havamal", specifically as it relates to the average person who isn't a scholar of Old Norse, or even an enthusiast of Viking culture....

The Greek poet, Hesiod, stands out as the first personality in European literature....

The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. It is of immense importance to the culture of the Indian subcontinent and is a major text of Hinduism....

"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell about those woods..."

Paradise Lost is a well-known and integral part of the English literary canon. Told as an epic poem in blank verse, Paradise Lost is John Milton’s retelling of the biblical story of Satan’s fall from grace and the beginning of humanity....

Rumi's Spiritual Verses is the greatest mystical poem in Islamic culture - and of all time....

Odysseus has been away from Ithaca, the Greek city-state under his rule, for ten years while fighting in the Trojan War. After the fall of...

In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time....

Milton tells the story of man's creation, fall and redemption, "to justify the ways of God to men"....

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde by poet and writer Lavinia Greenlaw....

The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!). These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance....

The tale of the fifth king of the first dynasty of Uruk (in what is modern-day Iraq), who reigned for 126 years, according to the ancient Sumerian list of kings....

This beautiful collection of 196 of his poems, previously unavailable in English and now translated by native Persian speakers Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, will appeal to Rumi lovers everywhere who want a guidebook for their inner journey....

The Odyssey chronicles the many trials and adventures Odysseus must pass through on his long journey home from the Trojan wars....

"The Theogony" (“Birth of the Gods”) is a poem by Hesiod which describes the origin, position and relationships of the gods of the Greek pantheon. Hesiod created a synthesis of the diverse Greek traditions concerning the gods, in the form of a hymn invoking Zeus and the Muses....

Listening to The Satires by Juvenal is to come face to face with the corruption, the debauchery, the waste, the sloth, and the mean-spirited greed of ancient Rome....

The Iliad. Join Achilles at the Gates of Troy as he slays Hector to Avenge the death of Patroclus. Here is a story of love and war, hope and...

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings....

Humphries has rendered (Ovid's) love poetry with conspicuous success into English which is neither obtrusively colloquial nor awkwardly antique....