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
Yes.
And yet he also does follow the directions that that he's been given to.
Yes, and everything is transformed, as in a Beckett play, by his overwhelming negativity.
I mean it is the intensest, most extreme negativity that you get in literature.
That every single thing he sees and sometimes you can guess what what he's looking at is actually quite ordinary.
He's looking at some alders or he's looking at a bit of farm machinery, but the farm machinery comes from hell and the alders suggest to him suicidal
Men or women jumping into the Thames after some ghastly event.
So everything is transfigured by his intense, almost cursed negativity.
It's as if a curse is on everything.
And you feel the poem is developing as a way of alleviating the curse.
It's almost going through stage after stage of evilness to arrive at some kind of climax which will at least
Bring an end to it.
And it's such an interesting use of the Arthurian legend as well, in comparison with Tennyson, who goes on to write Idols of the King, in which all these knights are figured as as rather uh wonderful, noble Victorian gentlemen who are kind of being chivalric and showing how to be decent.
Yes.
Whereas Browning, who was in the round an optimist in various ways, as he's known for uh God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, and sort of phrases like that, can also produce
produce at the other pole a vision which yes, is is connects with uh twentieth and twenty first century sense of contingency randomness.
i impossibility to interpret things, that everything that goes along the way, that he meets along the way, he he s says, What does this signify?
Does it mean something?
He comes across a little river and he compares it to a snake uh that everything is transformed, as in something like Pilgrim's Progress, into some allegory of evilness or badness or malignity.
Um and we are seeing it through his phantasmagoric imagination.
Showing 61–80 of 404 · page 4 of 21
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