Seamus Perry
speaker
386 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Seamus Perry’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
I teach English at Balliol College in Oxford.
And as always, I'm speaking to Mark Ford, poet, critic, and professor of English at University College London.
I suppose one place to start might be to say, I guess we think of Wordsworth as being, in some senses, quite a positive or optimistic poet.
He seems to have a very good and upbeat message about nature, about the imagination, about the spiritual life.
And yet these two poems that we're going to talk about today are tragic and they are some of the saddest poems I've ever read.
Yes, I think...
I think he had an intuition that there was something philosophically kind of significant about it.
And I suspect that that's because Coleridge told him that there was something philosophically significant about it.
And that's why he kept it back for what he must have perceived as a weightier
you know, vocation.
And that philosophical interest, as always in Wordsworth, is about your relationship to nature and how that works.
And the opening section of The Ruined Cottage is very brilliant about that, isn't it?
It starts with a paragraph of lovely
natural description t'was summer and the sun was mounted high along the south the uplands feebly glared through a pale stream and all the northern downs in clearer air ascending showed far off their surfaces with shadows dappled o'er of deep embattled clouds a lovely scene and then we get a sudden shift don't we to the speaker
other lot was mine across a bare wide common i had toiled with languid feet which by the slippery ground were baffled still and he's played with insects the insect host which gathered round my face and joined their murmurs to the tedious noise of seeds of bursting gorse that crackled round
So we've already got two very different attitudes towards nature, haven't we, expressed in a very subtle way.
One, I suppose, a kind of traditional, beautiful landscape, and one all about how nature is kind of, you know, and admittedly in part a sort of trivial way, is a kind of a persecutory thing that won't let you be comfortable.
And those, I suppose, are the two attitudes towards nature in one way or another that are going to persist all the way through the poem.
Your marginality is the mark of your authenticity.
That's the interesting point, isn't it?
Showing 181–200 of 386 · page 10 of 20
← Previous
Next →