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
Numerous as shadows haunting fiery the brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay of old romance.
These let us wish away.
So there's a sense, isn't there, in which the castle is a romantic and enchanted and beautiful place.
an erotic space, but it's also a space that's full of rich and pampered people who Keats has an absolutely sort of principled dislike for.
Hello.
We spoke in a previous installment about the wonderful moment when a brilliant young man from the West Country, called Samuel Taylor Coleridge, erupted into the life of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, siblings from the Lake District, who had found themselves living in Dorset in June 1797.
As they all befriended one another at breakneck speed, the poets naturally read one another their latest literary efforts.
Dorothy wrote to a friend, the first thing that was read after he came was William's new poem, The Ruined Cottage, with which he was much delighted.
And after tea, he repeated to us two acts and a half of his tragedy, Osorio.
Well, apart from devoted Coleridge scholars, no one much concerns themselves with Osorio, I'm afraid, but The Ruined Cottage has become one of the central texts of the Wordsworth canon.
And this is surprising, in a way, since it didn't actually appear as a separate poem under that title until 1969.
Wordsworth had never printed it as a standalone work.
Instead, he incorporated it, heavily revised,
into book one of a weighty philosophical epic called The Excursion, published years later, which these days really is a bit of a specialist's delicacy.
Late in life, Coleridge was so revered by his young circle of young admirers that they scribbled down everything he said.
And one of his recorded remarks was that the opening bits of the excursion should have been published separately.
Under the title, he suggested The Deserted Cottage, which would have made, he said, one of the most beautiful poems in the language.
And much earlier than that, in 1815, he'd said that he'd always thought of that as the finest poem in our language.
comparing it with any of the same or similar length.
Well, it's that early poem that we're looking at today.
Showing 141–160 of 386 · page 8 of 20
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