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
When I edited London History in Verse, it's very hard to find Keats poems that reference London itself.
But he was an absolute Londoner and he was a particular kind of Londoner.
He was a Cockney or was seen as a Cockney and associated with what got called the Cockney School.
And I think that's a really important aspect in terms of his social status within the world of poetry, that he was despised by such as Byron and by Lockhart, who reviewed Endymion as vulgar, as somehow a vulgar Cockney who was sullying with his kind of vulgarity
nouveau fantasies, classical mythology, or in the case of Everson Agnes, kind of medieval romance.
In terms of the dark or the cold and heat as well, I think probably, or the enchantment and disenchantment, we should put the poem a bit in the context of his life, that the disenchantment could be very easily connected to the death of his brother, Tom, on December of 1818.
and the enchantment with his meeting Fanny Braun, with whom he had this famous romance.
So the competing forces or polarities of enchantment
and disenchantment were playing out in his life.
And he's 23 at this point.
He's very, very young, but he was fascinated by narrative poetry.
Much of his complete works is narrative.
Endymion is all narrative, all four wonderful books of it.
Our listeners may not have read Endymion, and it can seem a sprawling morass of a poem, but you read it line by line, and it is so uplifting and
just Keatsian.
And the phrase, the word Keatsian means something.
It means kind of sensuous, immediate, vivid, rich, erotic, full of a kind of potential.
Also, I think, and this is very much the case with the Evas and Agnes, a kind of rapture, a kind of reverential idea about love.
Because I think the first thing to say about the Evas and Agnes is it's probably the greatest love poem in the language.
maybe up there with Troilus and Crusade by Chaucer.
Showing 101–120 of 404 · page 6 of 21
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