“Darius Green and His Flying Machine” was written c.1870, and I’m including it in the podcast because the poem captures the mixture of wonder and disdain that many people felt toward those who aspired to build a flying machine during this period.
You can read the text of the poem here.
“Darius Green and His Flying Machine” is in the public domain. This recording ℗ 2016 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved.
The title calls to mind Eric Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine”. That work has a totally different tone though, having none of the disdain and all the wonder, “the triumph of a human being ascending in the dreaming of a mortal man”. It is of course a much later work, being written in the first years of the 21st century.
Can be easily found on YouTube, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsLiivVgxmM .