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
to tears this aged man and poor.
And there's a really brilliant essay on Keats by Lee Hunt.
And he talks about how flattered is such a brilliant phrase.
The flattered is exquisite because it's a kind of tribute to the Beadsman's vanity.
that he remembers his youth, he mourns the parting of his youth.
And what Hunt says about that phrase, flattered, is, as John Bailey pointed out in a brilliant essay of 1962, just the kind of observation that people like Hazlitt and Coleridge were making about Shakespeare's language.
That flattered to tears doesn't tell us anything about Keats, but it tells us something about human nature.
And while so much romantic poetry was concerned with what Keats called, in relation to Wordsworth, the egotistical sublime, what is so astonishing about Keats as a romantic poet, and maybe one aspect of the tragic nature of his relationship to his times,
that in fact he wasn't an egotistical poet at all.
He was a Shakespearean-type poet whose imagination put him in touch with the energies of nature in a way which wasn't self-confessional or revelatory in any way, but somehow had that impersonality, which was precisely what such as Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb were appreciating about Shakespeare in that period.
They not only freeze, they ache, which is the Keatsian word.
I mean, as you go through this poem, you can identify the Keatsian words like ache and blushed and stared, which are instinct with that visceral bodily power to invigorate the verse with what it's like to be alive.
And that's for both good and bad, for both pain and joy.
Actually, those sculptures were partly inspired by Grindling Gibbons I learned the other day.
Oh, is that right?
Yes, that Keats went to somewhere called Stansted Park while he was staying at Bedhampton with Brown.
And there was some Grindling Gibbons carvings and also the casement there.
The triple arched casement also probably alludes to that.
And I mentioned that just because of the astonishing way Keats filters his own everyday experience into the romance of a poem set in the Middle Ages.
That is one of the most beautiful and brilliant things about the poem.
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