Stream Classic Poetry Readings from Harvard’s Rich Audio Archive: From W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas

Found­ed in 1931, the Wood­ber­ry Poet­ry Room at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty fea­tures (among oth­er things) 6,000 record­ings of poet­ry from the 20th and 21st cen­turies. There you can find some of the ear­li­est record­ings of W. H. Auden, Eliz­a­beth Bish­op, T. S. Eliot, Denise Lev­er­tov, Robert Low­ell, Anais Nin, Ezra Pound, Robert Penn War­ren, Ten­nessee Williams and many oth­ers.

In the “Lis­ten­ing Booth,” a sec­tion of the Poet­ry Room web­site, you can lis­ten to record­ings of clas­sic read­ings by near­ly 200 authors, includ­ing John Berry­man, Robert Bly, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Brod­sky, Jorie Gra­ham, Sea­mus Heaney, Jack Ker­ouac, Adri­enne Rich, Anne Sex­ton, Wal­lace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Anne Wald­man, William Car­los Williams and more. The sound files are all free to stream. And if this is your kind of thing, make sure you vis­it the Penn Sound archive at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, which is an equal­ly rich and amaz­ing audio archive. We pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured it here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads Great Poet­ry by Bil­ly Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Man­gu­so

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien