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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So the relics are there in the landscape, and it's a question for Wordsworth of decoding or interpreting to the urban reader, because many of his readers were urban, weren't they?
The Lyrical Ballads was actually popular.
It was published in Bristol, but it was popular in London and popularised, and its admirers were...
sophisticated, cosmopolitan people.
So that's worth keeping in mind in terms of its reception.
But what both poems have in common is heartbreaking accounts of how people's lives disintegrate or fall apart.
And the pressures are social pressures as well as psychological pressures.
And both these two poems have a degree of detail
in descriptions of actual living the you know ordinary living people real people in a real place he famously talked about the real language of real men we absolutely believe don't we in michael and in margaret as people who did exist um i mean they did have have possible kind of um
sources in folklore that Wordsworth was making use of.
And The Ruined Cottage is, as you were saying, in terms of its status in Wordsworth's studies, it's really astonishing.
It really is like a kind of early bootleg, which Wordsworth then made a bad later recording of, or a worse later recording of.
And then in the 60s with the Jonathan Wordsworth book,
the music of humanity, people discovered the original and thought, wow, how great was Wordsworth before he became a little bit rhetorical and, dare I say it, pompous in moments and his language gets more latinate and complex.
But The Ruined Cottage is Wordsworth in his absolute youth, discovering himself.
And it's like a kind of supernova, I think, that bits of it fly off in all kinds of different directions into his oeuvre.
The peddler figure whom we meet in it becomes absolutely crucial to his own self-fashionings, this kind of wanderer who is full of pity and sympathy and has kind of prophetic leanings.
And it teaches us how to feel.
But there are a lot of poems in the lyrical ballads that are about rural poverty.
And it is odd that he never managed to repurpose The Ruined Cottage so that it worked for the lyrical ballads, that he sort of kept it on, kept tinkering with it until it came out in 1814.
Showing 181–200 of 404 · page 10 of 21
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