http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx The Elsie Dee Project is dedicated not only to the diffusion of poetry, but also to the exploration of the musical formulas which one could call the 'lowest common denominator'. Copyright 2007 - 2009 Pierre Voyer and Boyd Williams SOCAN http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/images/Arthur_Michault.jpg http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx en Song 26 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman is another lover of simplicity, but of a fiercer kind of robust simplicity. No lace making, but sophisticated nakedness. People who prefer daylight to romantic moonshine, the early risers of happiness, will easily identify with this violent optimist and soon forgive him his naive narcissism. Moving awhile is a patchwork Elsie Dee made out of bits of much longer poems. Song 27 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare is too notorious to add anything new about him, but his sonnets and poems in general are certainly the least known part of his work. The single theme of the sonnets is the passage of time and its harm on the love that, as we have learned through experience, never doth runs smooth. A sentence from Marcel Proust illustrates, in concentrated, the two-mile fifty-six towards one hundred fifty-four sonnets trying to express: "And what would be the wrinkles and circles under the eyes if it wasn?t for the sufferings of the heart". Song 29 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Taliesin. The Song of Taliesin is to Welsh culture what the Kalevala is the Finnish culture or what Deuteronomy is to the Judeo-Christian culture: an alphabet which is also a calendar where each line is a step (moon) whose name is that of a tree. Elsie has added a few repetitions so to give this poem an air of sacred jingle. Song 13 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Lewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll pseudonyme Charles L. Dodgson, was born in Daresbury in 1832. A celebrated intellectual, he is especially known for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He left many poems including the masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. Song 14 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of the Redding Geole is certainly one of the sadest poem this witty man has written. It is full of gore and morbidity, but it is also a very touching look life gone by while one was dancing and frivolously enjoying the profound superficiality of life. A short extract of this long poem has become Elsie Dee's song "The Gallows". Song 18 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Edward Elstin Cummings. E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1894. His travels to France in the early XXth century nurrished his appetite for modernism. Taking a defenite step away from symbolism, he created an innovative, playfull and nontheless strictly formal poetry. Song 2 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Algernon Swinburne. Charles Algernon Swinburne was born in London ( England) in 1837. Even if his victorian contemporaries were outraged by his mystical appraoch of morbidity and his unconventional use of sexual imagery, he remains an absolute master of the English meter. Taken from his Hymn to Proserpine Song 5 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics byLewis Carroll. Lewis Carroll pseudonyme Charles L. Dodgson, was born in Daresbury in 1832. A celebrated intellectual, he is especially known for Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He left many poems including the masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark. Song 8 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Edward Elstin Cummings. E. E. Cummings was born in Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1894. His travels to France in the early XXth century nurrished his appetite for modernism. Taking a defenite step away from symbolism, he created an innovative, playfull and nontheless strictly formal poetry. Song 9 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Algernon Swinburne. Charles Algernon Swinburne was born in London ( England) in 1837. Even if his victorian contemporaries were outraged by his mystical appraoch of morbidity and his unconventional use of sexual imagery, he remains an absolute master of the English meter. Taken from his tragedy Atalanta in Calydon Song 22 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Emperor Yuraku. This first Japanese song by the Elsie Dee Project is made of six tankas (short poems of five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables) related by a common theme: the mono no aware or "feeling of things". They are sometimes attributed to the legendary emperor Yuraku, but as we know more about them since the German scholar H.J. Klaproth has translated them and made them available to the western world, we realize they originate from the ancient Japanese oral tradition kept in the Manyoshu.