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
And Dorothy uses the phrase, wonderful.
And that is the phrase that captures Coleridge's complete uniqueness and his aura.
But what we mustn't forget, I think, in this conversation is the absolutely hallucinatory power of this thing, that it works viscerally, that people who read it do not forget it.
And that's probably the most important aspect of it.
It's visuals and also it's rhymes and it's kind of...
its metrics, the way it works somatically on you as you read it physically is the most potent aspect of it.
So while we can interpret it in relation to transgression and punishment and Christianity, paradise lost, and so on and so forth,
You do have to remember that it is this thing that's like the ancient mariner.
It grips you, and it doesn't let you go.
Yes.
The idea of the exile, the lonely, transgressive figure, the satanic figure based on very close to Milton's Satan, who has been exiled from paradise in some way.
and is doomed.
He's an early version, you could call him, of the poet Maudie, the cursed poet who is somehow transgressed in some way.
In the case of Cain, he kills his brother Abel, which is a kind of version of what the mariner does with the albatross.
And in terms of the collaboration, it's worth saying that it was Wordsworth who suggested that as the kind of key moment in the poem.
He suggested to Coleridge that the mariners should kill this seabird
and that would be the pivot of the poem.
But The Wanderings of Cain, which they plan to collaborate on, and that didn't really work any better than The Ancient Mariner did.
Coleridge's sort of prose bits of it are absolutely unbelievable, I think.
And they look forward to the kinds of...
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