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
And it does create this very intense experience.
And there's no one else in the poem.
That's there's no maiden to rescue from a dragon, there's no lady who's guiding him.
There's no sense in which his masculinity is in the service of anything useful in relation to the body politic.
It's just a demented quest that he's been made to do because of King Lear.
Yes because he's read King Lear.
And in in that sense it
i it is almost one of those poems which does seem to be about the anxiety of influence, the ways what is available for a poet writing in the eighteen fifties after so much great poetry.
Where how can you conjugate out of all your great sources?
And Browning was a great reader.
His dad was a uh unbelievable bibliophile, wasn't he?
He collected over six thousand books, and Browning grew up reading randomly through his father's kind of library.
Uh and his father was was a poet as well, and they encouraged Browning.
And he had a very happy upbringing, as far as one can tell.
Where the negativity of children
Roland comes from is no one has ever kind of put their finger on it, have they?
There's no experience lurking behind it.
But you're right, it it can seem like a late Sylvia Plath poem, and it's kind of conjugation of despair and helplessness and and a kind of invocation of dark spirits, which is kind of a kind of form of enchantment or witchery, which it casts a spell over you as a.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's the interesting aspect, that of Keats as a Londoner.
Showing 81–100 of 404 · page 5 of 21
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