Anthology: Visionary Poems from Yeats, Whitman, Blake & Myth (from the archive)

An episode from 3/3/24: Tonight, I read from a handful of what I call “visionary” poems. After an introductory section of familiar nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets, I go back to the sources of those, which are found in religious scripture and myth:

• W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming”
• T. S. Eliot: sections from The Waste Land and “East Coker”
• Walt Whitman: the first section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
• William Wordsworth: from the thirteenth book of The Prelude
• William Blake: from his long poem Milton
• The first chapter of Ezekiel(from the JPS audio Tanakh)
• A speech from Euripides’s Bacchae, tr. William Arrowsmith
• Part of the eleventh book of the Bhagavad-Gita, tr. by Amit Majmudar in his Godsong
• I close the episode with a reading that will not surprise long-time listeners.

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