the-poetry-of-edgar-allen-poe

Product Description<br/><br/>Father of the detective story and the modern gothic horror tale, Edgar Allan Poe was also a great lyric poet who influenced a professional international audience as diverse as Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky. his American contemporary, Emerson, dismissed him as "the jingle man," but Europe admired and emulated his romanticism and theory of poetic unity.<br/>Poe explores love, death and despair, reflecting the anguish he suffered throughout his own short, troubled life.<br/>Performed here by various stars, including Christopher Cazenove, Joel Gray, Gregory Hines, Roger Rees, David Warner and Michael York, the emotion and reality of Poe's feelings are brought to life.<br/><br/>From Library Journal<br/><br/>One would think that Poe's work would translate perfectly into dramatic interpretations, and certainly the first volume reviewed here works extremely well, but by the second tape, where poems are admittedly written from dreams, you realize how easily a poor reader can overdramatize poems best read quietly, if read at all. None of this is helped by the intent of New Millennium to gather as many readers as possible (Michael York, David Warner, among others) and inadvertently break up the unity of a poet's voice. Whitman fares no better, with the editors electing to present snippets here and there, out of context, and supplying no context, with performances by Joan Allen, Burt Reynolds, and others. Only Frost's poems seem well presented (there are 11 different readers, including Elliott Gould, Melissa Manchester, and Alfre Woodard), but he's also the poet whose work is best relayed in short poems from different periods in his career. The programs are recommended for comprehensive audio collections only, although readers such as Joel Grey, Gregory Hines, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. might make these attractive to theater buffs. Individual poems are not listed on the packaging of the Poe and Frost tapes, where readers are listed en masse, giving no indication as who reads what. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York<br/>Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.