title: The Caedmon Collection of English Poetry (Successful Living Series)
author: International
description: This collection of great English poetry is interesting but uneven. It is based on Caedmon's archives, which contain some rare gems and some pieces that work primarily as cultural oddities. In the first category are Sir John Gielgud, who does a magnificent job with Shakespeare, and the various poets (Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Ted Hughes) who read their own work. Other poets, such as Milton and John Donne, are read well, but, not surprisingly, without quite the flair Gielgud delivers. In the second category are works such as Boris Karloff reading Rudyard Kipling. Each individual rendition is interesting and well done, but the collection does not form a unified whole. G.T.B.  AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- <i>Copyright  AudioFile, Portland, Maine</i>
zlib_text: OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS 
  THE CO LL ECT E D  POE M S  
  C. P. CAVAFY was born in 1863 into a well-to-do Greek mercantile 
  family in Alexandria, Egypt. After his father's death and the begin­
  ning of the family's financial difficulties, the young Cavafy moved 
  with his mother and brothers to England, where they spent the 
  period 1872-7 in Liverpool and London. Apart from three years in 
  Constantinople from 1882 to 1885, he spent the rest of his life in 
  Alexandria, where he worked, until his retirement in 1922, as a senior 
  clerk in the Irrigation Department, living alone (after the departure 
  of his brother Paul in 1908) in a relatively large apartment near 
  the centre of the city. He visited Greece on only four occasions. He 
  began publishing poetry in periodicals in 1886, but abandoned many 
  of his early poems, and self-publication gradually became his pre­
  ferred means of disseminating his work. By the time of his death in 
  1933 his poetry was widely known-though the subject of much 
  