Word: caedmon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Surprisingly, the poets seem to be least at ease while draped in their own literary garlands, e. e. cummings wanders through selections from his Him and Santa Claus (Caedmon) with the air of a sleepwalker groping in a murky crypt; John Masefield sibilates waveringly through his The Story of Ossian (Argo) in a reading that does nothing to relieve the poem's turgid dramatic flow. The opposite failing-a tendency to rhetoric where mere passion would do-mars Sir Ralph Richardson's swooning reading of The Poetry of Keats (Caedmon), and turns Carl Sandburg's A Lincoln...
...best disks have majesty and force enough to lift the listener from his chair. Centuries of reading aloud have not yet dimmed the Elizabethan magnificence of the great King James Bible passages, and James Mason brings sonority and good sense to his declamation of Ecclesiastes (Caedmon), making the nameless narrator sound as contemporary as an existentialist in Paris, as ancient as a Pharisee. The sound track of the movie Oedipus Rex (Caedmon, 2 LPs), starring Douglas Campbell and Canada's Shakespearean Festival Players, transports listeners inside the towering walls of seven-gated Thebes for the bloody working...
...Merchant of Venice (Caedmon, 2 LPs), is a rousing production containing Michael Redgrave's controversial Shylock, who demands his pound of flesh from Antonio in a thick and rather phony Jewish accent that is neither gefüllte fish nor fowl...
Robert Frost (Caedmon) proves a happy exception to the rule that poets cannot read their own works as well as actors. Frost's cracked voice often sounds like that of the first progenitor of mankind, and his lucid verse sings of subjects appropriate to that early time - the whisper of a scythe in grass, the stumbling of a spindle-legged calf, the rains of autumn...
Robert Graves (Caedmon) reads his prose (from The White Goddess) with passion and his poetry with clean detachment, but both in the measured tones of a man setting the world straight. For lovers of magic and the Moon Goddess...