Tag: Poetic Licence

❝
The eye, it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.
❞
— William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) — Britain’s poet laureate between 1843 and 1850 — was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads in 1798. You can hear his poems read out aloud — lower the volume to hear his words whispered — at the sites below:–

The Poetry Archive
The Poetry Archive’s database contains more than 2,500 poems ready to be listened to, as they say, “listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud”:
The Poetry Archive
–
Wordsworth’s Poetry
Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude. It is an autobiographical poem in blank verse which was intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem The Recluse, which Wordsworth never finished. He began The Prelude at the age of 28 and continued to work on it throughout his life.
William Wordsworth

The British Library
Listen to the British Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings, which cover the entire range of recorded sound including, drama and literature, oral history and regional accents and dialects:
British Library Sounds
–
Survey of English Dialects
The Survey of English Dialects (SED) was a groundbreaking nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England. From 1950 to 1961 a team of fieldworkers collected data in a network of 313 localities across England, in the form of transcribed responses to a questionnaire containing over 1300 items. The informants were mostly farm labourers, predominantly male and generally over 65 years old as the aim of the survey was to capture the most conservative forms of folk-speech. Almost all the sites visited by the researchers were rural locations, as it was felt that traditional dialect was best preserved in isolated areas. It was initially the intention to include urban areas at a later date, but this plan had to be abandoned on economic grounds (which is a shame):
Survey of English Dialects
–
Evolving English
This selection of recordings celebrates present-day English accents worldwide. The collection, created between November 2010 and April 2011 by visitors to the British Library exhibition, “Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices’, includes contributors of all ages and embraces varieties of English in the UK and overseas including non-native speakers. The database can be search on country (of speaker) and generation (decade of speaker’s birth).:
Evolving English

The National Poetry Library
The U.K.’s National Poetry Library collection contains over 200,000 items that are available online:
The National Poetry Library’s catalogue