The shock of the old: my trepidation at hearing Tennyson

I worry that his tone may make too clear the interpretation of the poem

It was with some trepidation that I put into my CD player a recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson reading his poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade". It is, as they say, a new release, and undoubtedly the strangest of the week. The British Library has released the compilation of early recordings of writers reading their own works. By any standards that makes remarkable listening.

But I worry. I worry that Tennyson's tone may make too clear the interpretation of the poem. Will he read it in a cynical tone, in a sad tone, in an indignant tone? Writers can on occasion give too much away about their own work. I remember being irritated when Arthur Miller was interviewed for television by David Thacker, head of the Young Vic in London at the time. Thacker was putting on a season of Miller plays. One of them was The Price, and Thacker asked Miller whether a certain key line in it should be spoken in anger or in sadness. As soon as Miller answered that question, it became impossible for any actor to speak the line any other way. Before Miller's answer it was a matter of interpretation; after the answer it was plain wrong.

So I had fears about hearing Tennyson on CD. And not just Tennyson. The British Library discs are a real literary compilation. Almost a Now That's What I Call Poetry. The next track after Tennyson is Browning with Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon and Ezra Pound a few tracks farther on. As it turns out Tennyson's reading, recorded in 1890, has one supreme advantage he could not have anticipated. The crackling on the recording – transferred from wax cylinder and "cleaned up" using digital technology – sounds uncannily like horses charging. Tennyson reads his verse in a stentorian tone, which unquestionably grows sadder as the reading continues. What is odd is that he strongly emphasises, almost shouts, the word rode in the line, "Into the valley of death rode the six hundred". I'd have thought "death" was the word to stress, but again on the line, "Into the mouth of hell rode the six hundred", it is rode that gets the full Tennyson blast. We'll never know why.

There is nothing that disillusions the listener in Tennyson's reading. I find that I'm a little more uneasy on hearing Robert Browning attempt to recite "How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix". He was a guest in 1889 at a dinner party, where the newly invented phonograph had been brought along, and was persuaded to do a turn. After a few lines he stops and shouts: "I'm sorry, but I can't remember my own vahses". This isn't quite how I imagined the great romantic. But of course he, like Tennyson, spoke in the received pronunciation of his time and class. It just comes as a shock.

But with the shock is a sense of privilege at hearing some of these hitherto unreleased recordings. There is almost a sense of intrusion in hearing Vita Sackville-West reading from a manuscript copy of Orlando, the book that Virginia Woolf dedicated to her.

Some of the readers deliver performances that are true to type. WB Yeats is predictably rebellious, thankfully. As he introduces "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", which he says was inspired by a soft-drink advert, he states, in the 1933 recording: "It gave me the devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am about to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose." Yeats is not alone in wanting to declaim his verse in idiosyncratic style. Edith Sitwell reads the poems of Façade with an orchestra playing. That has to be rap of the highest order; Hilaire Belloc sings rather than speaks "Tarantella"; Ezra Pound accompanies himself on kettledrum for his performance of "The Seafarer".

A lecture by Kipling also from 1933, is included on the British Library CD and can be seen as containing a fitting summary for the project. Kipling says: "It is only words, nothing but words that live, to show the present how men worked and thought in the past."

But it shows something more. It shows the present how men and women spoke. And just as it is sometimes hard to dissociate a writer's life from their work, so it is can be difficult to read the verse in anything but the author's voice once you have heard it. It seems almost an impertinence to apply any tone, emphasis or rhythm that is not the author's own. And that's a mixed blessing. With Tennyson as with Arthur Miller, I would have liked my own imagination to supply the tone of voice. Instead, henceforth, I will always put the stress on RODE in "The Charge of the Light Brigade", even though I can't see why.

¿ Sir Simon Rattle received mixed reviews for his recent Beethoven Symphonies. Gramophone magazine's reviewer said that they compared badly with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 1992 recording. Warner Classics needed no further prompting and have reissued the Harnoncourt set of CDs for a head-to-head battle. Who says no one listens to critics?

d.lister@independent.co.uk