Audiobook · read by volunteers
Art and Heart
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), Anna Maria Stone, Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Anita Roy Dobbs, Betsie Bush, Catharine Eastman, Christiane Levesque, Christie Nowak, David Barnes, David Jaquay · 38 chapters · 1 h 10
About the book
One poem, thirty-eight voices. To celebrate the first anniversary of LibriVox, volunteers from many places each recorded the same poem, Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Art and Heart, giving us thirty-eight different readings of the same lines. Each voice finds its own pace, its own emphasis, its own feeling.
The poem was originally suggested by the volunteer Betsie Bush and was chosen for this special collection because its message, that it is heart rather than art that wins the world, matched the spirit of the project. Listening to the versions side by side is a small lesson in how a reading can change a text. In thirty-eight short sections and just over an hour, this recording is both a celebration of a community and an invitation to listen closely to poetry and to compare.
Introduction
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) was an American poet and journalist, whose verse was enormously popular in her day. Her poems were widely printed in newspapers, and she published many volumes. Her work was often sentimental and moralising, and it appealed to readers who wanted lines they could remember and quote. Her best-known poem, Solitude, with its lines about laughing and weeping, circulated in many forms.
Art and Heart is a poem which Wilcox published in 1883. For this recording, it was used for a special project to mark the first anniversary of the creation of LibriVox. The volunteers offered thirty-eight different recordings of the same poem. It was originally suggested by Betsie Bush and was chosen for this special collection because its message, that it is heart rather than art that wins the world, matched the spirit of the project.
The collection is an example of what is called a multi-version recording. It is made up of the same text read by different people, and the pleasure of listening is partly in comparing. Each reader finds a different pace and a different emphasis. Hearing so many readings in a row shows how much a voice contributes to a poem.
The recording has 38 sections, one per reader, and lasts a little over an hour. All the readers are LibriVox volunteers. Why listen today? It is a good way to hear what a reading adds to a text, and it records an early moment in the life of a volunteer project that has since produced thousands of books. It is also a pleasing curiosity for lovers of poetry and of spoken language, to be listened to a few versions at a time.
Public domain
Ella Wheeler Wilcox died in 1919: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text