LibriVox's Most Wanted poetry collection

Here is a delightful irony for the literary-minded: a collection of poems by ten of the twentieth century's most celebrated authors, none of whom could otherwise be recorded for LibriVox. Their novels remain under copyright in the United States, their names evoke apologies in the forums, so instead we get their early verse. J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis, William Faulkner, Kahlil Gibran, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, and Ernest Hemingway appear here not as the novelists who shaped modern literature, but as younger poets finding their voices. Some of these pieces predate their authors' famous works by decades. The result is something rarer than any of their novels: a glimpse of these writers before they became themselves, experimenting with form, testing their intuitions, writing poetry that has no pretensions beyond the personal. For anyone curious about how great writers begin, or simply for lovers of verse tucked into unexpected places, this collection offers ten small windows into literary history's most famous names, before history made them famous.