We've recently highlighted a number of recordings of the poetry of Walt Whitman made by beloved UPenn emeritus professor John Richetti. Today we're going to cover the rest of the poets whose work he performed in his most recent session, including Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Given the season, how can we not start with Poe? Richetti's September home recording sessions included several of the poet's more iconic titles, including "Annabel Lee," "To Helen," "El Dorado," "Israfel," and "The Conqueror Worm." Interestingly, Richetti's selections all appear in Jerome McGann's 2011 set of Poe recordings, where you'll also find "The Sleeper," "Dream-Land," "The Haunted Palace," "The Raven," and "Ulalume - A Ballad."
Next, Richetti revisits Coleridge, reading "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in its entirety. Richetti performed a number of works by the poet in a 2014 session, including "The Rose," "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "Kubla Khan," "Dejection: An Ode," and "Frost at Midnight," which you can hear on the same page. Finally, Richetti returns to Tennyson — the focus of the recordings he made for us this past April — with one new poem, "The Eagle."
Numerous previous sessions with Richetti are available on PennSound Classics, spanning more than a decade. They include his prodigious "111 Favorite Poems for Memorizing," "The PennSound Anthology of Restoration & 18th-Century Poetry," and his audio anthology of English Renaissance Verse. Richetti has additionally recorded selections from Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, John Dryden, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, John Keats, Andrew Marvell, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walt Whitman William Wordsworth, and William Butler Yeats. These lovingly-made recordings, rendered in Richetti's distinctive tenor, are a tremendous resource for the classroom or for any lover of poetry.
With the exception of the aforementioned anthologies, PennSound Classics is divided by author, so you can see Richetti's ample contributions alongside those of many other poets and scholars. To start browsing, click here.
