Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1890)

The earliest complete recording of a poem belongs to Lord Tennyson. In 1890, Thomas Edison was attempting to cement his dubious status as the sole inventor of sound recording. As part of his sales campaign, he sent agents around the world to record the voices of famous figures.

Here Tennyson reads his “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” It's not an especially stirring reading, but the sheer age of the recording lends it a haunting quality. Look out for the rhythmical knocking half way through the recitation; the 81-year-old Tennyson appears to be hammering his fist to convey cannon fire.

On other Edison wax phonograph recordings you can hear Robert Browning forgetting the words to his poem “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” at a dinner party and Oscar Wilde giving rich voice to a snippet of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”