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
in the later version and the wanderer again is the archetypal romantic Wordsworthian poet prophet figure who strides around the land and observes things and interprets them for us and makes us feel that life is worth living as you say joy is the most common word in Wordsworth's lexicon more or less isn't it so the Wordsworthian drive was towards some sense of celebration
And yet both these poems are moving in the opposite direction and present narratives which are irredeemable.
There is no recovery from these narratives.
There's nothing, although at the end the Armitage and the poet try to salvage some kind of wisdom from it.
You don't feel that.
You're not convinced by that.
Margaret's wasted life, Robert's disappearance, are inexplicable, appalling, and leave you grieving.
That grief, Wordsworth says, is good for you.
It enlarges your sympathies and so on.
And one can think that for a while, but that doesn't really
As with the ancient mariner, the moral doesn't really address or satisfy the emotions aroused by the story itself.
That's true.
The ancient mariner does buttonhole the wedding guest who's not too happy about it and rather regrets it at the end.
Whereas Armitage and the poet are buddies, aren't they?
They sort of share the same philosophy and they actually end up sort of sharing an in together at the end of the poem.
Yes, yes.
So there's a sense in which there's a kind of a buddy movie going on within this poem, which I compared to a bootleg and a buddy movie that is quite inappropriate.
But I think that they are the frame narrative through which we experience Margaret's slow loss of everything that makes her life meaningful.
Yeah.
And it is connected to social history, isn't it?
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