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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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I mean, Wordsworth turned against it and said we should, you know, it didn't get such a good position in the 1800 edition.

But 1798 does kick off with the ancient Mariner.

It does.

And it's not a bad start.

To talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

And to hold his listeners spellbound.

And it's interesting that he chooses a mariner, though, isn't it?

As far as I can tell, the only time Coleridge had been in a boat by the time he wrote this was going across from Chepstow to...

across the Severn towards Bristol.

That he does go on to go on to Malta and so on.

But he read enormously in Captain Cook's voyages, didn't he?

And in travel books, stretching back over the centuries.

And of course, he was also reading a lot of abolitionist material as well.

He was very, very political in this early period.

And he was a kind of

famous kind of radical lecturer.

So the Mariner figure who's getting up to tell his story is one who then channels Coleridge's own prodigious reading.

And no body, possibly with the exceptions of say Milton and Eliot, has been able to sort of galvanize his reading

into his own creations with quite the kind of intensity and vitality and individuality and idiosyncrasy that Coleridge's manages.

Because this story is sort of off the scale, isn't it?

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