Zombie Poets Post to YouTube from Beyond the Grave

Most poets have pretty strong constitutions. It's pretty heard to shock or discomfit the poetry community, when a lot of what poetry is about is shocking or surprising readers. But the YouTube channel simply known as "poetryanimations" is sure to send a chill up any poet's spine.

This channel is complete with over four hundred videos of what appear to be classic portraits of poets paired with mock-recordings of their voices. The catch is, when you hit play the portraits begin to move as if they themselves were reciting. The result is very cool for poetry buffs, but a bit creepy. Here's an example of Emily Dickinson "reading" I Cannot Live with You:



Doesn't it seem a little like these poets have come back from the dead in these videos? Faces and voices that in the past we could only imagine now appear before us, reading poems that we know intimately. It's probably a little like the feeling our grandparents got when they saw Jack Benny on television for the first time, rather than the radio. A particularly eerie one is seeing and hearing Robert Frost read the nearly ubiquitous "Road Not Taken":



The fantastically-rendered videos are the work of London videographer Jim Clark. He does a great job making one's skin crawl by animating the videos in a way that's very believable. And creepy or not, his work is about the closest we can get to a post-mortem visit from our favorite bards. I leave you today with the poet that has my vote for "Most Likely to Return from the Dead": Edgar Allen Poe. After watching, be sure to head over to YouTube for the rest of the collection!