All spoken voice  recordings on  www.eaglesweb.com, its two front pages (index and default) and two alternate front page masters, and its 4,806 other files and directories, excluding image files and music files, are licensed under a Creative Commons License unless otherwise identified on one of the pages. 
eaglesweb.com poetry for the ear in the tradition of blind Homer 

The music you are now hearing is "Echo Pavan & Galliard " [Musica Britannica 114] by William Byrd, a contemporary of Shakespeare.  The work was sequenced by Canadian harpsichordist John Sankey, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for his kind permission to use all of his many recordings on Eaglesweb.com.

POEMA AD LIBITUM, Fortnights IV-V (July 23 - August 19, 2004)
chosen at the discretion of your reader, with his notes where appropriate.

Thomas Hardy [1840-1928][British novelist and poet]:
A Meeting with Despair [1:23]

John Masefield [1878-1967][British poet-laureate, 1930 until his death]
A Wanderer's Song [1:08][recorded as above]
Sea Fever [0:58][His most famous sea poem]

Wm. Shakespeare [1564–1616][English actor, director, playwright and poet]
Carpe Diem [0:34]

Herbert Asquith [1873-1953] [British Prime Minister, Liberal Party (1908-1916) and war poet]
The Fallen Subaltern [01:16]
The Volunteer [0:55]

William Faulkner [1897-1962][American (Southern) writer, winner of Nobel Prize]: 
Excerpt from As I Lay Dying [0:19] [recorded August 9, 2004]

Matthew Arnold [1822-1888][British]: [recorded August 9, 2004]
Growing Old [1:36]
John Keats, who died very young, did not write of this subject.  However, many poets live past seventy (myself included) and they inevitably do so.  Hear also Wm. Butler Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium; Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses (and also his Tithonus).  From a usually humorous poet, hear Ogden Nash: Old Men [0:18] and Untitled [written near the end of Nash's life][0:18]

Percy Bysshe Shelley [1792-1822][British]: translator,
Love Song from 'Cyclops' [0:28] by Euripides [480-406 BC](right).  The latter was the last, chronologically, in the line of the "Trinity" of classical Greek tragedy playwrights after Aeschylus (the first) and Sophocles.  Euripides can be considered the "father" of modern drama.  (Certainly the American playwright Tennessee Williams owed a great deal to Euripides.)    

Robert Bridges [1844-1930][British]
My Delight and Thy Delight [0:51]
To the United States of America [0:53] [a war poem][recorded July 30, 2004]

Edwin Arlington Robinson [1869-1935][American]

The Dark Hills [0:26]
The Mill [1:03]
Miniver Cheevy [1:15]
Sonnet: Richard Cory [0:55]
Prior to his discovery by President Theodore Roosevelt, Edwin Arlington Robinson [1869-1935] was a New York subway inspector. Previous to this job experience, the poet had attended classes at Harvard and was published in the Harvard Advocate.  His subsequent attempt at self-publication failed to support him, whereupon he took the job with the subway.  Teddy Roosevelt had read his poetry and liked it, and appointed him to a government job with the U.S. Customs Service for a five year sinecure, after the end of which Robinson dedicated his next volume of verse to the President. The poet was a friend and confidante of the American poet Amy Lowell [1874-1925], whose poetry is also heard on this website.  - W.R.E.