Mark Ford
speaker
404 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Mark Ford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I think there are a couple of points to make about that.
One would be that the extent to which both Browning and Tennyson created their poems out of other people's writings, the literariness of the post romantic generation, whereas kind of Wordsworth or Blake uh or could feel in touch with uh with mythologies around them that they were experiencing and their poetry could connect and be the real language of real men.
with Mariana and Ulysses and Charles Rowland, uh, you're getting poetry made out of other people's poems.
So there's a sense in which their anxiety of or the Victorian poets can be related to the extent to which the sources of their poetry uh wasn't life always, uh or it was life filtered through other kinds of writing.
But I would briefly like to sort of touch on the vast uh
Number of proto-Shakespearean plays written in the Victorian period, which of which Browning himself wrote a great number.
Yes.
Strafford, Return of the Druzes, A Blot in the Scotcheon, King Victor and King Charles.
He was, Browning was very prolific.
And we'll talk about him as a narrative poet.
And this is Charles Rowland in comparison with so many of Browning's.
Poems is rather short.
He kicks off with Pauline, which is extremely long.
Paracelsus, Sordello.
You mentioned obscurity in Browning.
Uh Jane uh Carlyle famously said of Sordello that she read the whole thing and wasn't clear whether Sordello was a man, a city or a book.
by the end of it.
So Browning's famous obscurity, which meant he was completely unpopular uh until well after Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was hugely popular had died.
That even um men and women didn't really find an audience until sort of eighteen sixties.
Uh and of course he culminates this narrative um experiments in the ring in the book, which is uh I I used to teach it, it's a vastly
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