Showing results by narrator "Robert Bethune" in All Categories

Robert Frost's second book of poetry. Sometimes puckishly humorous, sometimes elegiac, sometimes terrifying, these poems show the young artist using his new-found voice to explore a world - a village in New Hampshire - that meant everything to him. This volume includes some of his best-known and best-loved works, such as "The Road Not Taken", "Out! Out!", "Birches", and "The Hill-wife". It also includes one of his poem-dramas, "Snow".

In this, the third volume of the work, William Hazlitt takes us through the a critical period in Napoleon's life: his leadership of France as first consul. He shows us how the political developments of the time coincided with Napoleon's personal development, the experiences that convinced him that France needed a new leader, and how he came to believe that he himself was that leader. This volume ends with the greatest transition of all, from first consul to emperor.

Frost's third book of poetry, North of Boston, is an extraordinary set of poems that are nearly dramas, conversations drawn from the heat of life, love, and death. From "Home Burial" and "Death of the Hired Man" to "A Hundred Collars" and "The Generations of Man", Frost's work in this volume spans the whole range of human experience, expressed always in his characteristic dry, matter-of-fact, yet wonderfully musical verse.

The best way to appreciate this long and fascinating poem, really a novel in verse, is to just let it wash over you. Don't try to get caught up in the story, for Byron won't let you do that; don't try to figure it out, for Byron doesn't want you to do that either. Just listen to the man converse with you and enjoy his playful talk - that's why he wrote it, and that's what it's for.

Childe Harold narrates the experiences of a young nobleman, sated with the wine, women, and song of his native England, who goes forth in search of the wine, women, song, and adventure of Spain, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. The book is literally an armchair travelogue in rhyming couplets. He expresses himself in vivid, forceful and emotional language on all that he enounters and shapes his experience into a deep study of that subject so favored by all the Romantic poets - himself.

In this, the 13th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, finds ample scope for his favorite approach. His subject is a well-documented historical figure: Ali Tepelini, most often known as Ali Pasha and known even in his own day as The Lion of Tepelen. Dumas presents us with an extraordinary character, a man of tremendous courage, unstoppable tenacity, matchless duplicity, extreme debauchery, disgusting cruelty, and amazing ingenuity.

To paraphrase the note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the third of the series, Dumas tells the story of three centuries of sectarian violence and civil war between the Protestants and the Catholics of the south of France.

This volume of The Poetry of Lord Byron is focused on work in which Byron dealt with certain themes that recurred throughout his career, especially personal integrity in the search for freedom and for love, and the suffering that can go with that search. "The Prisoner of Chillon", the keynote piece of this volume, is one of Byron’s most riveting pieces. Based on the true story of Francois Bonivard, it tells a story of political repression and human endurance.

We hope you will enjoy these fine, old-fashioned stories that Lord Byron wrote in an old-fashioned way. He tells these tales in rhyming verse and heroic couplets, and he makes them dashing, romantic, and even melodramatic in a way that has become foreign to us with the passing of time.

With Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, cantos III and IV, Byron comes to the high point of his work and to clear and definite mastery of his art as a poet. Though he himself doubts his powers - he says his visions no longer swim so palpably before his eyes as once they did - his visions are far more palpable to us, expressed as they are with the full depth of his romantic and passionate feelings. He continues the device of the journey of the fictional Harold, but Harold is almost a ghost; the thin disguise and facade that separates him from the poet essentaily vanishes.

The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père was not written for children. The novelist has spared no language - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In this, the 14th of the series, Dumas, the novelist-historian, brings his storytelling skills to a famous subject: the background of one of the most famous of French lawsuits, centering around the secret abduction of Bernard de la Guiche, later count of Saint-Geran, from his mother, Suzanne de Longaunay, by the marquis de Saint-Maixant.

In these two tales drawn from the magical world of the jungles of India, Rudyard Kipling explores issues of good and evil, courage and honor, materialism and spirituality. In "The King's Ankus", the wolf-boy Mowgli confronts a treasure made long ago by humankind--treasure for which humankind will kill, and kill, and kill again. In "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat", a man who has known wealth, and power, and great responsibility casts all that aside for the humble life of a wandering beggar-priest--until circumstances bring him once more to take command and save life.

In this, the second volume of the work, William Hazlitt takes us through the history of Napoleon's campaigns in Italy and Egypt. In the course of these campaigns, and in Napoleon's life in Paris between them, we can see a young, brilliant military leader starting to transform himself from a leader of armies into a leader of nations. His brilliant successes on the battlefield bring him to the adoring attention of the French people and the rather alarmed attention of the French government.

The beautiful, elegant, heartbreakingly sad story of Lancelot, Guinevere and Arthur is Edwin Arlington Robinson's subject in his 1920 novella in verse, Lancelot. His focus throughout is on one side of the triangle, that of Lancelot and Guinevere. Robinson does not give us Malory's tales of jousts and tournaments; he sets his poem instead in the quiet moments of reflection, hope, anger, forgiveness, remorse and honesty that allow him to explore the meaning of this, one of literature's most enduring love stories, in the depths of the hearts and minds of his characters.

Thomas Gray is worldfamous as the author of "Gray's Elegy", more properly known as "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". He did not write very much, but he did write more than just his most famous poem. This collection is a recording of the 1768 Dodsley edition, the primary publication of his poetry that he published during his lifetime.

In Earth Triumphant, Conrad Aiken's first major book of poetry, he took on a significant subject: What is the ultimate source of the human spirit? When the young human spirit loves, rages, strives, plays, where does that energy come from? When the old human spirit sees that time has passed and death is coming, where does that spirit find rest?

Housman himself knew that his output as a poet would not be large. In his preface to this volume, he wrote, rather touchingly: "I publish these poems, few though they are, because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much more." He pulled Last Poems together because his life-long friend, Moses Jackson, was dying and Housman wanted Jackson to be able to read these poems before Jackson passed away.

In this set of "Uncanny Tales," Mary Louisa Molesworth deftly makes us feel the shiver of ghostly mystery without actually giving us a ghost! Or, to put it another way, she's interested in a different kind of ghostly presence. In "The Man with the Cough", it is the ghostly presence of a secret agent, and the ghostly experience of events that seem like a dream, but have real-world consequences. In "Halfway Between the Stiles", it is the ghostly presence of old memories of love that will not die away, and again, the real world responds. In "Will Not Take Place", it is a man who almost becomes a ghost.

Rupert Brooke possessed one of the most amazingly sensitive, amazingly sensual poetic minds of the 20th century. Born into a world swiftly sliding into war, torn between highly idealized, romanticized relationships with men and conflicted, often bitter love for women, he expressed his complex emotions and vivid perceptions in verse of startling force, striking sensory intensity, and sometimes sly and biting humor. He left us just under 100 poems before his terribly untimely death of sepsis while serving in the British Navy.

Renowned experts delve into the stark reality of the Alien presence on Earth. Riveting case studies of Air Force and Naval Alien encounters, UFO crash retrievals, interactions with E.T.'s, suppressed Alien technology and more are explored suggesting a foreboding and spellbinding conclusion for the fate of Mankind.