Poetry for Winter Listening

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 920, 29 March 1957, Page 23

Poetry for Winter Listening

HIS winter poetry enthusiasts. will have a weekly half-hour programme from all YC stations at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesdays, starting on‘March 27. The first group of programmes introduces great poets of the past. There will be la session each of Donne, Wordsworth, | Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, and the | Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, followed | by a composite programme on Dryden, | Congreve, Pope and Blake. : The rest of the 26 programmes, which will run until September 18, will be of modern English and American poetry, read by the authors. There will be two sessions each of T. S.. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay (read by Judith Anderson), Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, Vachel Lindsay, Archibald MacLeish, Ogden Nash, Osbert Sitwell, and one programme of Tennessee Williams, the playwright, who reads a short story, The Yellow Bird, as well as Some Poems Meant for Music. These poets record for Caedmon, an American company started by two young women | in New York, who now specialise in contemporary poets reading their own work. They have also done important work in uncovering old recordings and re-issuing them, as they have done with the only two records extant of Vachel Lindsay. These records have not been broadcast here before, and listeners will be interested to hear the poets’ own inter- | pretation of their work.