Word: caedmon
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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...
...unspoken words occurs in the craggy uplands of literature, where a talented ham can jump and shout without trampling the daisies. James Mason smacks and snuffles his way through the fevered minds of Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi and the tomb-haunted bishop in Poetry of Browning (Caedmon) in a reading that can illuminate a character with a sigh...
...TRAGICAL HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF DR. FAUSTUS (Caedmon). A rousing reading of Christopher Marlowe's curdled dramatic tale, with Frank Silvera particularly powerful as a Faustus who displays glimpses of the vile body peeping through the scholar's gown...
DYLAN THOMAS READING "A VISIT TO AMERICA" AND POEMS (Caedmon). The persistent bestseller among the pressed poets introduces his fourth posthumous album by biting the fans that fed him, with an assault on the "culture vultures" who lie in wait for traveling English poets. That chore out of the way, he sets to reading Walter de la Mare, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy in the familiar, tumult-ringing style that makes every poet who ever lived sound like Dylan Thomas...
...RELUCTANT DRAGON (Caedmon) tells of a poetry-loving dragon forced against his will into fighting St. George at 6-4 odds. Except when he becomes too coyly patronizing, Boris Karloff spins his tale with wit, makes it as appealing to adult listeners as its author's far more famous yarn, The Wind in the Willows...