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
The mixture, I often focus on the word matting.
I hope we'll come to the word matting later on in the poem as having a sublime banality, ordinariness.
which is also being filtered into this high romantic tale and his own personal life is details from it are being enchanted and becoming part of the magic test texture of the poem yes it's all part of that wonderful sort of informal keatsian dialectic between the ordinary and the romantic isn't it which is what makes what makes so many of his poems so wonderful
That's true, and he also needs them to create the kind of heroic isolation of Porphyro and Madeline.
So it's in contrast...
to the social kind of whirl that they achieve their individuality and their distinctiveness and their opposition.
So whereas a poet like kind of Byron would have the hero being the star of the ball, Porphyro is excluded from the ball because there's a Romeo and Juliet style and antagonism between the two families, though Keats doesn't go into it much.
But we know that Dwarfish Hildebrand, if he gets hold of Porphyro, things are not going to work out well.
So that it is got that treasured,
precious, transient sense of vulnerability.
I think that's also a key phrase, isn't it, for the Keats experience, vulnerability, that Porphyro has that vulnerability because he is in the castle as an intruder and at any moment might be surprised and sort of exposed and put to death.
But yes, I mean, there was a satirical aspect of Keats, wasn't there?
But the satire in this case works hand in hand with the romance.
it exaggerates the romance.
It makes the romance seem more different from what's happening around it and creates that special cocoon in which we experience Porphyro and Madeline.
They are both extremely moving, and I defy any of our listeners to finish Michael without weeping towards the end.
It is one of the most heartbreaking poems ever written.
He was much concerned with rural poverty in his earliest career, and he was very politically engaged, and both of these poems are
can be seen from one perspective is about a social realist poems about urban poverty and about the dispossession of people who are connected to the land and they work together as a diptych really don't they they both got as their central image this decaying in the case of the ruined cottage a decaying set of walls
and in the case of Michael, a sheepfold whose walls never get built.
Showing 161–180 of 404 · page 9 of 21
← Previous
Next →