The Poetry of Wanderlust: The world is your oyster

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wordsworth and Sarojini Naidu

Narrated by Ghizela Rowe, Gideon Wagner and Richard Mitchley

What’s in a word? Apart from its value as a unit of information is there something more? Of course. Many words sound and express themselves, when rolled around the soul and mouth, as something both desirable, tangible and complete. We submit that ‘Wanderlust’ has just such a feeling.

Most of us have an urge to journey, to take the body and mind on a journey that will sate our curiosity, build our experiences and memories and prepare ourselves for yet another.

Whether as a child journeying wide-eyed through a field, a teenager exploring hitherto forbidden zones or as adults embarking on journeys that may change our lives and relationships with new cultures, foods and sounds - it seems as if we just can’t get no satisfaction till the next far-off place.

In this volume of classic poetry our wordsmiths are our companions on journeys near and far. They describe and create worlds that we can explore with them, word by word and line by line.

In the company of Keats, Wordsworth, Bronte, Whitman, Kipling and a wealth of others these journeys in verse will be like no other.

1 - The Poetry of Wanderlust - An Introduction

2 - Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman

3 - The Vagabond by Robert Louis Stevenson

4 - Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson

5 - El Dorado by Edgar Allan Poe

6 - The Land of Nod by Robert Louis Stevenson

7 - The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear

8 - Foreign Lands by Robert Louis Stevenson

9 - Going Down Hill on a Bicycle, a Boy's Song by Henry Charles Beeching

10 - By My Two Feet and Endless Times by Daniel Sheehan

11 - Sonnet on Approaching Italy by Oscar Wilde

12 - Constantinople by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

13 - In the Bazaars of Hyderabad by Sarojini Naidu

14 - To the City of Bombay by Rudyard Kipling

15 - Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse by Matthew Arnold

16 - England and Switzerland by William Wordsworth

17 - In Amsterdam by Eugene Field

18 - Dear Old London by Eugene Field

19 - Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

20 - A London Thoroughfare. 2am by Amy Lowell

21 - In Excelsis by Arthur Cecil Hillier

22 - Ballade of an Omnibus by Amy Levy

23 - A Ballad of London by Richard Le Gallienne

24 - The Night Journey by Rupert Brooke

25 - Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

26 - From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

27 - Rhyme of The Rail by John Godfrey Saxe

28 - In the Train by James Thomson

29 - To a Locomotive in Winter by Walt Whitman

30 - The Ancient Arteries of America by Daniel Sheehan

31 - Monadnock by John Gould Fletcher

32 - To the Nile by Keats

33 - Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

34 - Cities and Thrones and Powers by Rudyard Kipling

35 - Tezcotinco by Alan Seeger

36 - In the Belly of This Metal Beast by Daniel Sheehan

37 - The Royal Tombs of Golconda by Sarojini Naidu

38 - Penmaenmawr by Patrick Branwell Bronte

39 - Sonnet to Lake Leman by Byron

40 - Lines Written in the Highlands After a Visit to Burn's Country by John Keats

41 - The Isles of Greece by Byron

42 - The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

43 - Away to Canada by Joshua McCarter Simpson

44 - Good-bye. Off For Kansas by John Willis Menard

45 - Ballade of Running Away with Life by Richard Le Gallienne

46 - To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent by Keats

47 - The Lake Isle of Inisfree by William Butler Yeats

48 - Deep in the Quiet Wood by James Weldon Johnson

49 - A Song of the Road by Robert Louis Stevenson

50 - I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth

51 - I Travell'd Among Unknown Men by William Wordsworth

52 - Home Thoughts from Abr

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839679650

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850, the only son of an engineer, Thomas Stevenson. Despite a lifetime of poor health, Stevenson was a keen traveller, and his first book An Inland Voyage (1878) recounted a canoe tour of France and Belgium. In 1880, he married an American divorcee, Fanny Osbourne, and there followed Stevenson's most productive period, in which he wrote, amongst other books, Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped (both 1886). In 1888, Stevenson left Britain in search of a more salubrious climate, settling in Samoa, where he died in 1894.