I love visiting the public libraries in Singapore and rummaging through their bookshelves. Their attractions don't end there. Logging on to the National Library Board website, one can also look up the Oxford English Dictionary, read newspapers and journals, or even listen to poetry.
I just heard the poet Paul Muldoon read two poems by Dylan Thomas — Fern Hill and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night — and The Good Morrow by John Donne. All I had to was go to the National Library Board website and click on the link to the Columbia Granger's World of Poetry.
John Babcock from Columbia University Press sent me an email telling me about this link after I blogged about the popular poems on the Columbia Granger's website. He wrote:
Thanks for mentioning our site on your blog. You may not realize it, but the National Library of Singapore has a subscription to Columbia Granger's World of Poetry. Patrons of this library also enjoy remote access, which means any registered patron of NLB can access our fine poetry resource from any computer. Lastly, we recorded contemporary poets reading the most 100 anthologized poems in the English language and have made it available on our site. Click on the Listening Room tab on the homepage.
Yes, do that. You can read and listen to poems such as The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, Break, Break, Break by Alfred Tennyson, Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats, Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sailing to Byzantium by WB Yeats. You can read commentaries on them.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on this day in 1806, reminds the Columbia Granger's website. So here's a link to her most famous poem, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
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