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.
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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
Not quite the poem that Coleridge listened to with such admiration on that summer evening in 1797, as that very, very first version doesn't survive.
The poem
that we're going to talk about called The Ruined Cottage is the revision, the expansion of that original poem.
And it's reworking was done under Coleridge's influence in the spring of 1798, which is one of the things we're going to go on and talk about.
We have a second great Wordsworth narrative poem to talk about as well, Michael, written a couple of years later.
It also has an odd Coleridge connection.
The scene has now changed.
The Wordsworth have returned north and they've taken Coleridge north with them.
The origins of Michael lie in stories that Wordsworth remembered from his childhood.
And the story of Michael or the original of Michael took place near Grasmere where, of course, the Wordsworths had settled at the end of 1799.
In October 1800, Dorothy records in her journal, after dinner, we walked up Greenhead Gill in search of a sheepfold.
So, they're trying to, you know, find the centerpiece of this piece of folklore that Wordsworth had remembered from his childhood.
And Dorothy mentions a very striking detail that didn't make it into the poem explicitly, but perhaps haunts it nevertheless.
She writes, the sheepfold is falling away.
It is built nearly in the form of a heart, unequally divided.
At this point, Wordsworth and Coleridge were putting together the second edition of their landmark volume, Lyrical Ballads, and Coleridge's job was to finish his extraordinary, spooky narrative poem, Christabel, which tells the story of a household destroyed by the catastrophic arrival of an irresistible, supernatural femme fatale, and Coleridge couldn't finish it.
And so Wordsworth wrote Michael against the clock to fill the space in volume two.
And in so doing, as we'll go on to say, I'm sure, he wrote his own narrative about the destruction of a home, although, of course, in completely unsupernatural terms.
So those are our two texts for today.
My name is Seamus Perry.
Showing 161–180 of 386 · page 9 of 20
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