The power of poetry (2:28)
By Dana Gioia
"Jenny Kiss'd Me" (1:29)
by Leigh Hunt Read by Kay Ryan
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1:48)
by William Butler Yeats Read by Anthony Hopkins
"We Wear the Mask" (:49)
by Paul Laurence Dunbar Read by Rita Dove
"Fire and Ice" (:42)
by Robert Frost Read by N. Scott Momaday
"The Good-Morrow" (2:08)
by John Donne Read by David Mason
"anyone lived in a pretty how town" (2:53)
by E. E. Cummings Read by David Mason
"Pied Beauty" (2:17)
by Gerard Manley Hopkins Read by Kay Ryan
Conveying emotion, with excerpts from Hamlet (1:32)
"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" (1:47)
by Dylan Thomas Read by Alfred Molina
"The World Is Too Much with Us" (1:25)
by William Wordsworth Read by Angela Lansbury
"Fern Hill" (3:10)
by Dylan Thomas Read by Anthony Hopkins
"Ozymandias" (1:11)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley Read by N. Scott Momaday
Kay Ryan remembers her grandmother (1:38)
N. Scott Momaday remembers his parents (:41)
David Mason on knowing poems by heart (1:09)
"Hope is the thing with feathers" (1:32)
by Emily Dickinson Read by David Henry Hwang
"When You Are Old" (1:18)
by William Butler Yeats Read by Diane Thiel
"The Road Not Taken" (1:32)
by Robert Frost Read by Dana Gioia
Sonnet 55 (1:26)
by William Shakespeare Read by James Earl Jones
"When I Have Fears" (1:08)
by John Keats Read by Rita Dove
"To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1:01)
by Anne Bradstreet Read by Alyssa Milano
"I think I should have loved you presently" (:58)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay Read by Alyssa Milano
"Dream Deferred (Harlem)" (:48)
by Langston Hughes Read by Khandi Alexander
"I Hear America Singing" (1:39)
by Walt Whitman Read by Richard Rodriguez
From "Annabel Lee" (2:12)
by Edgar Allan Poe Read by Khandi Alexander
"The Unknown Citizen" (2:12)
by W. H. Auden Read by Alfred Molina
"Miniver Cheevy" (2:11)
by Edwin Arlington Robinson Read by David Mason
"My Last Duchess" (3:44)
by Robert Browning Read by Alfred Molina
"Dover Beach" (2:29)
by Matthew Arnold Read by Angela Lansbury
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (2:33)
by Wallace Stevens Read by N. Scott Momaday
"I heard a Fly buzz—when I died" (:58)
by Emily Dickinson Read by Kay Ryan
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (6:27)
by T. S. Eliot Read by Anthony Hopkins
Kristin Tsuo