Length1h 52m
About this audiobook
Excerpt: "A poet may write pleasingly about mountains, and cyclones, and battles, and the love of woman, but if he is at all timid about the verdict of posterity he should avoid the theme of childhood as he would avoid the plague. For only great poets can write about childhood poems worthy to be printed. Hilaire Belloc has written poems about children, and they are worthy to be printed. He is never ironic when he thinks about childhood; he is gay, whimsical, with a slight suggestion of elfin cynicism, but he is direct, as a child is direct. He has written two dedicatory poems for books to be given to children; they are slight things but they are a revelation of their author's power to do what only a very few poets can do, that is, to enter into the heart and mind of the child, following that advice which has its literary as well as moral significance, to "become as a little child." And in many of Hilaire Belloc's poems by no[xxv] means intended for childish audiences there is an appealing simplicity that is genuinely and beautifully childish, something quite different from the adult and highly artificial simplicity of Professor A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad. Take that quatrain The Early Morning. It is as clear and cool as the time it celebrates; it is absolutely destitute of rhetorical indulgence, poetical inversions or "literary" phrasing. It is, in fact, conversation—inspired conversation, which is poetry. It might have been written by a Wordsworth not painfully self-conscious, or by a Blake whose brain was not as yet muddled with impressionistic metaphysics."
Audiobook details
GenrePoetry
Length1 hr 52 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 3, 2021
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1INTRODUCTION
25AUVERGNAT
2TO DIVES
26DRINKING SONG
3STANZAS WRITTEN ON BATTERSEA BRIDGE DURING A SOUTH-WESTERLY GALE
27DRINKING DIRGE
4THE SOUTH COUNTRY
28WEST SUSSEX DRINKING SONG
5THE FANATIC
29A BALLAD ON SOCIOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
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6NOËL
30AN ORACLE
7THE EARLY MORNING
31HERETICS ALL
8THE BIRDS
32THE DEATH AND LAST CONFESSION OF WANDERING PETER
9OUR LORD AND OUR LADY
33DEDICATORY ODE
10IN A BOAT
34DEDICATION ON THE GIFT OF A BOOK TO A CHILD
11COURTESY
35DEDICATION OF A CHILD’S BOOK OF IMAGINARY TALES
12THE NIGHT
36HOMAGE
13THE LEADER
37FILLE-LA-HAINE
14A BIVOUAC
38THE MOON’S FUNERAL
15TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA
39THE HAPPY JOURNALIST
16VERSES TO A LORD
40LINES TO A DON
17THE REBEL
41NEWDIGATE POEM
18THE PROPHET LOST IN THE HILLS AT EVENING
42THE YELLOW MUSTARD
19SONG
43ON HYGIENE
20THE RING
44THE FALSE HEART
21CUCKOO!
45SONNET UPON GOD, THE WINE GIVER
22THE MIRROR
46THE POLITICIAN OR THE IRISH EARLDOM
23THE LITTLE SERVING MAID
47SHORT BALLAD AND POSTSCRIPT ON CONSOLS
24THE END OF THE ROAD
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