HOWZAT

Yet maybe we should look on the bright side and marvel that any such recordings exist at all. Older releases from the British Library have given us such wonders as Tennyson reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade, in 1890. The quality is inevitably dodgy, but the effect is still magnificent, the poet declaiming in a weird, shamanic drone, his voice quavery but still captivating at 81. Or there’s Robert Browning a year earlier, reciting one of his poems at a dinner party in a quick, high-pitched delivery, wonderfully lively for a man of 77. After a few lines, he stops and apologises — “I’m sorry but I can’t remember me [sic] own verses” — after which there’s a general chorus of bravos! and hip-hip-hoorays!. This is not only a remarkable recording of Browning, but also an authentic and, I would guess, unique eavesdrop on an actual Victorian dinner party in full swing. Very jolly it sounds, too.

Tennyson’s monotone style reappears in other poets. Yeats delivers The Lake Isle of Innisfree similarly, with a slightly sarcastic introduction, in which he says: “If you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with this.” Yeats had been writing world-class poetry for 40 years or more since The Lake Isle, but this was the one people always wanted to hear, and he usually obliged, if with a little sigh.

There’s Hilaire Belloc not reciting but singing his Tarantella; TS Eliot reading Prufrock beautifully, in a perfect English accent; and, perhaps most barking mad of all, Ezra Pound giving us his translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, while accompanying himself on the kettledrums. Yes, okay, this sounds like Pound in his most loony and annoyingly “Look at me, I’m a poet” mode, but once you get acclimatised, it’s superb. Pound rolls his Rs (and, you imagine, his eyes) and declaims like a deranged Scottish Calvinist preacher man inveighing against Sunday opening. The poem, from the 8th or 9th century, has all the gaiety and joie de vivre of Philip Larkin, but it’s a very un-Larkinesque, stirring, magnificent sort of Dark Age gloom, with Pound banging away on his kettledrums:

Disease or oldness or \ sword-hate Beats out the breath from the \ doom-gripped body . . . There come now no kings or Caesars \Nor gold-giving lords like those gone . . .

It would, of course, be interesting to hear the voices of other kinds of artist; but painters and composers can be famously inarticulate and dull.

I don’t think Beethoven would have made a great interviewee. And if you tire of cultural figures, the British Library also offers the voices of Gladstone, Lenin, that famous speech of Florence Nightingale’s — the list is long and distinguished.

The Spoken Word: British Writers and American Writers, £19.95 each; The Spoken Word: Poets is only available second-hand

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