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
That we learn that two terrible harvests in this version, it's it's
10 years ago.
In the later version, it's 20 years ago, isn't it?
The two terrible harvests have ruined everyone's prospects and the land is full of beggars and no one can get a job.
And this is what is the kind of catalyst for the breakdown of Margaret's household.
Yes.
There was a bit of collaboration though.
Aren't there four lines still by Wordsworth which are into it?
And listens like a three years child, the mariner hath his will is the first of those.
We'll come on to the second later.
So the notion of a collaboration
was very much in the air during this astonishing, astonishing period from basically spring 1797 and Lyrical Ballads comes out in the autumn of 1798.
And Wordsworth writes all his bits of the Lyrical Ballads more or less in three or four months in early 1798.
And the concept of the ballad and The Ancient Mariner is the most kind of ballady thing that Coleridge ever wrote was, I guess, an attempt to connect back to traditions of English poetry, which were vernacular and authentic and of the people and somehow had evolved like a folk tale.
I mean, there's been more criticism on The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner than possibly any poem ever written.
Probably.
It's certainly from the Romantic period.
It inspires unbelievable numbers of interpretation and explanation and critical exegesis.
It's up there with, say, The Wasteland.
It similarly has a kind of charismatic aura which magnetizes all those who read it.
Showing 241–260 of 404 · page 13 of 21
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