One of the world’s most popular music streaming services is good for much more than your daily pop or rap fix. Spotify has recordings of dozens of poets reading their own work, and World Poetry Day is the perfect time to check them out.
If you want to listen to great works of literature that you would never sit down to read, download T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” You can listen to one of the most important works of the 20th century in less than 28 minutes. Eliot, the great modernist poet known for foreboding zingers such as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” reads another one of his poems, “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock,” himself.
Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and E.E. Cummings also read their own work. If you’ve ever taken a high school English class, you probably know Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and now you can enjoy it again.
Since it’s also Women’s History Month, Spotify has a playlist of female poets reading their poems called “Poetry: In Their Own Voices.” The poets range from the late Gertrude Stein to 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner Sharon Olds. “Love Is Not All” by Edna St. Vincent Millay and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop are each worth the less-than-3-minute listen.
If you’re not an audiobook person, listening to poetry on your phone is the perfect medium between slogging through Moby Dick and streaming your favorite playlist. Most poems are only a few minutes long, and instead of pop lyrics getting stuck in your head, maybe you’ll get a few lines of poetry.
