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
They're pretty reckless people, aren't they?
They set off on this walking tour.
It's the end of November, and they set off at half past four in the afternoon.
Not to be recommended.
The evening was dark and cloudy.
We went eight miles in the dark, William and Coleridge employing themselves and laying the plan of a ballad.
And they want to write a ballad,
I'm sure partly because it's tapping into a kind of popular culture of a kind that they sympathize with for various kind of politically progressive reasons.
But they also want to write a ballad because ballads are actually very fashionable and they hope to make some money.
from the ballad.
Wordsworth tells us at another point towards the end of his life that the poem was initially inspired by a dream that one of Coleridge's friends had of a skeleton ship.
And we'll come on to the skeleton ship as we work through the poem.
But there are other things that they're trying to write together, and it's not quite working out there around this time.
I mean, so Coleridge gets very, very interested, doesn't he, in the figure of Cain.
Should we say something about that?
I think imagining, as it were, benighted failure was not really within Wordsworth's repertoire, at least at this stage.
It is.
Well, one of the things we must discuss, I suppose, is to what extent it is a supernatural poem and to what extent it is like Wordsworth's The Thorn and poems like that.
It's a kind of a dramatic monologue where you're interested in the psychology of supernatural experience rather than claims of genuine supernaturalism.
But anyway, we can come on to all that, I'm sure, as we continue our discussion.
Showing 241–260 of 386 · page 13 of 20
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