Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Poet Speaks: Poetry and Speeches on Spotify

Spotify is not only the best online music collection, it also offers many great recordings of historical speeches, audiobooks and poetry read by the poets. You can hear Dylan Thomas reads The Speech Of Oedipus At Colonus, T. S. Eliot reads The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, W.B. Yeats reads Lake Isle of Innisfree, and many more, includes Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake  read by James Joyce himself and remixed by DJ Spooky.  And beware, Oscar Wilde has an old witch's voice... For the speeches playlist, I also put in the classic radio shows from the young, hungry, pre-"Citizen Kane" Orsen Welles, who was then still eager to make his mark on the world.

Here's the Spotify playlists: The Poet Speaks (497 tracks, 23 hours) and Historic Voices & Great Speeches (728 tracks, 3 days). 



Posted by ulyssestone at 5:49 PM
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4 comments:

  1. It even has Aleister Crowley!

    http://open.spotify.com/user/hajimegraphics/playlist/1tW24ZKpuQ2jSp2sud5D2p

    Cheers, Ulysses!

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  2. Thank you so much for this, it's great! I was happily suprised to find Howl and America in there, Allen Ginsberg is one of my favourite poets.

    Keep up the fantastic work!

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  3. Wow. Thank you Ulysses.

    Any tips for finding poetry on Spotify?

    Searching for "poetry" doesn't yield much; searching for particular poets is laborious since relatively few are represented in the catalogue at the moment.

    p.s. searching for "Poets" doesn't return "Hear Great Poets Read: ...": any idea why that is?

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  4. Hi Pete,

    Since many song and album titles also contain words like "poetry" or "poet", it's better to use album search, like:

    album:reads poetry

    and when you find that a certain label has many poetry rocordings, you can also use label search:

    label:saland poetry

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