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
opiate dream that you get in De Quincey's writing.
There's this elaborate prose, and Cain is a figure like the ancient mariner who has done something terrible.
Well, yes, he's killed his brother.
And he's kind of haunted in various ways.
So this haunted exile protagonist, who is a fallen archangel in various ways, and it's worth
plugging them straight away, I guess, into the myth of Coleridge himself as a fallen archangel, that you talked about his wonderfulness, that he could talk for 24 hours, more or less, without stopping, and everyone was entranced, but he also did wear them out, and he caused some collateral damage in the process as well, so that he was brilliant, but also impossible.
and many people turned against him, such as Hazlitt and Southey and so on, that he did have an ability to both enchant and then later on to inspire a sense of disappointment or betrayal.
So this myth of the
person who has committed some primary transgression and has prophetic gifts on account of that, but who is also doomed in some way, permeates the Wanderings of Cain as it does the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
And Coleridge very musingly describes how he got on with the Wanderings of Cain.
He was going to do Canto I. That's right.
Wordsworth would do Canto II, and whoever had finished first would do Canto III.
and Wordsworth turned up with a blank sheet of paper.
And that was his contribution to The Wanderings of Cain.
No, we should... I mean, in the lyrical ballads itself, we should put...
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner against the thorn and the idiot boy and so on, and Wordsworth's own contributions to this rural ballad tradition, which are much more realist and don't have this supernatural aura.
But when they made their agreement to do the lyrical ballads, they were going to mix the supernatural
and the kind of, you know, the authentic and rural.
And while Wordsworth never really does do the supernatural, Coleridge takes that on.
And he does pretty well, doesn't he?
Showing 281–300 of 404 · page 15 of 21
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