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Better known in the English-speaking world simply as Rúmi, Jalálu'd-Din Muḥammad Balkhi (1207-1273) was a Persian scholar, theologian, and poet. After Omar Khayyam he is probably the most celebrated classical Persian poet and his luminously spiritual verse has been the subject of many notable English translations.

Oedipus the King is the story of a man whose life is destroyed by his own good intentions. When a terrible secret from his past is brought to the light of day, the consequences are chilling - and ineluctable.

This anthology of 140 poems, published in 1921, features the work of 97 British and American poets who were active in the early 20th century. Among the more famous names are John Masefield, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, William Butler Yeats, Robert Graves, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Edna St Vincent Millay, Joyce Kilmer and Witter Bynner.

Among the monuments of world literature, few works have been as influential as the Divine Comedy. Dante's compendious allegory of a journey through the world of the afterlife is significant on many levels. It established Italian as a literary language, and consolidated the position of Florentine Italian as the lingua franca of the Italian peninsula. As an engaging portrait of the social and intellectual life in medieval Florence it is unrivalled

The Diamond Sutra is one of the most revered philosophical texts in Buddhist literature. It has long been very popular among Buddhists in China, and with the exception of the Lotus of the Good Law, and the Leng-Yen-Ching, perhaps no other Sutra ascribed to Buddha is held by the Chinese in such esteem.

In this collection, the authors were striving for a natural and unaffected style of verse that sought to avoid the elaborate structures and artifice that they considered had characterized much of the poetry of the 18th century. Of the 23 poems, only four are by Coleridge, including "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", which is the most famous poem in the collection. The most notable contribution by Wordsworth is the concluding poem, "Tintern Abbey".

William Wordsworth belonged to a chosen band of poets for whom poetry was a priesthood, displayed in his unerring devotion to his art. He nourished his unique poetic gift by daily intimacy with Nature. It is Wordworth’s peculiar achievement to reveal the impulses at work behind the outward beauty of Nature, and to manifest its sustaining influence upon the spirit of man.

First published in 1872, The Martyrdom of Man has been described as the first synoptic history of mankind. It was one of the first surveys of history based on the then-controversial principle of organic evolution. The book received a very mixed reception: Cecil Rhodes lauded the work, stating that it had "made him the man he was", while William Ewart Gladstone stated that it was so dangerous that it should be banned.

This poem consists of 11 stanzas of varying length, the first four of which were composed in 1802. These deal with the subject of death, a concept with which Wordsworth confesses to having struggled within childhood.

Between 1895 and 1901 H. G. Wells wrote six science fiction novels, which have become among the most celebrated examples of the genre. In this collection, Wells explores a number of topics that have since become very common subjects in science fiction, including time travel, celestial beings, eugenics, alien invasion, and space exploration.

This collection of miscellaneous essays was published posthumously in 1921. In the first and largest section, The Hidden Power, the author identifies Spirit as the "innermost within" of all things and the unseen essence of all phenomena. He develops this proposition to claim that Spiritual Science has fixed laws just as does Physical Science, and that an understanding of the laws could enable man to develop powers of which he is currently unaware. The other essays cover a range of topics relating to metaphysics, the Bible and other arcana of religion.

Dooman's translation of the Rubaiyat, containing 180 quatrains, was first published in 1911. It has a roughhewn quality, reminiscent of the style of an earlier American translator, John Payne, who published a collection of 845 quatrains in 1898.

This lyrical ballad is one of Tennyson's most famous poems. The subject, the tragic passing of a reclusive noblewoman, was suggested by a 13th-century Italian romance, the Donna di Scalotta.

This pacifist manifesto was published in 1917, as the First World War was dragging to a close. The resolution of this catastrophic conflict resulted in a reconstruction of Europe, the fallout from which led to an even more cataclysmic war. Russell delineates the problem as being due to the institutionalizing of national hostilities and the consequent apportioning of blame among the warring parties. In his exposition Russell considers the roles played by a number of institutions, social and political, reserving some his sharpest criticism for organized religion.

The story of the adventures of the mythical hero Gilgamesh is the most considerable literary production that has come down to us from ancient Babylonia. Unfortunately, it was not preserved in complete form. This recording is of the fullest translation which had yet been issued in English when it was first published in 1917.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, the English poet Francis Thompson (1859-1907) was a true mystic. While more celebrated poets, like Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Arnold, were content to express their religious leanings in traditional devotional formulae, Thompson strove to portray the divine directly, in all its terrifying majesty. In this way he is more akin to earlier masters, like Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, than to the poets of his own day.

Together with Omar Khayyam and Jalāl ud-Din Mohammad Rumi, Khwaja Shams-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz-e Shirazi, more commonly known just as Háfiz, is considered one of the major figures of classical Persian literature. Gertrude Lothian Bell (1868 - 1926) was a traveler, archeologist, political advisor, and authority on Middle Eastern history and literature.

In this short treatise, New Thought author Christian Larson discusses the power of the subconscious mind and the importance of establishing a working relationship with it. In the words of the author: "What is produced in the within will invariably come forth into expression in the personality; therefore, by knowing how to impress the subconscious, man may give his personal self any quality desired, and in any quantity desired."

In this recording are presented readings of all five editions of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, translated by scholar Edward Fitzgerald, as well as biographical material about Fitzgerald and Omar Khayyam and a laudatory poem by Andrew Lang.

This collection, first published in 1914, contains 28 short pieces in prose and verse, which present themes frequently explored in Gibran's other works. These include love, death, creation myths and spiritual realization.