Good morning everyone!
I suppose that when you were a child, you used to listen the music that your parents or old brothers or sisters listened to, don´t you? And then you singed aloud at home without understand almost any word that you were saying. In my case, my father is a big fan of Joan Manuel Serrat, so I grow up singing lyrics like Mediterraneo or Caminante no hay camino, as you can see, there are difficult lyrics that a little child cannot understand. However when I was a teenager and I was studying literature at high school, I realized that those lyrics I had interiorize some years ago there were poems. Then I found some others music bands that use well known poems to make it songs like Marea with Ciudad de los gitanos by Federico García Lorca or Tierra Santa with Canción del Pirata by José de Espronceda. Even there are some CDs composed by poems of an author and singed by different artists, I have found one of Antonio Machado and another one of Pablo Neruda.
So… I was wondering if this will happen with the English poets too. Because of that I started to look for information (difficult task because I don´t know lots of the names that appear in my research and I didn´t know if there are famous English poets or not). And… as we can expect, the most of the song I have found are about Shakespeare poem, but there are others too like: Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda or Federico García Lorca have songs in English too! Now we are going to go one by one. I´m going to show you some works of each author.
William Shakespeare: About him there is an album which is a compilation of some of his sonnets performed by famous actors and musicians. It is called When love speaks. Here I give you one of them.
Live with me and be my love by Annie Lenox
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBxOsITRPeU
Edgar Allan Poe has a poem, Annabel Lee which it have been versioned by different musicians, here you have the one who did Tiger Army, but there are some other versions by Radio Futura and by an Israeli singer, Shlomo Artzi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZScUxZbe-AQ
Emily Dickinson has a lyric album with her poems too, singed by Aaron Copland and Enrico Maria Polimanti.
Federico García Lorca has a poem Pequeño Valls Vienés that belongs to the book Poeta en Nueva York which Leonard Cohen versioned with a song called Take this Waltz. Have a look, personally I love it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8nWVWE4sjk
Pablo Neruda has a whole album too with some of his sonnets recorded by musicians. The album is called Neruda.
I´d like to go deeper and explain you a little bit more about each writer and author but that is going to take me a lot of time, so if you are interested on it please don´t dude and look for information about it, ask me for help if you need it.
To conclude I have to say that I´ve learnt a lot preparing this post and I hope you will learn and enjoy as I have done.
Hi Yéssica!! I really liked your post because I was surprised with it. You have started talked about the songs that we listened at home when we were children and I feel identify with you because as you said, my father always was listening music and I did not understand the meaning especially the English songs.
In other way, I was surprised with the point that there are poems make into songs. This part I liked especially because I did not hear so much about this aspect. Also related with this point, I really liked your hard research about English poems transform into songs. I think it is difficult to find this Works by spanish artista because it is an aspect that we do not be familiar with it. When I continue Reading your post, I have found that you have had researches about English artists too so I can imagine that it was very difficult for you.
I have tos ay that you have done a good work because you had shown us perfect examples to understand your work.
For conclude, I think this work can be useful in our clases to work poetry through songs with our students because it is motivating for them and it is a creative and innovative way to work with poems.
Thank you to share with us this work.!!