The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
SMP #13: Goody Blake and Harry Gill: A True Story by William Wordsworth
Why do we cease to teach through the medium of verse? In children we happily sing songs and tell stories to convey moral tales and even astronomy, math, and economics.
We know how effective this is in teaching young children ("My Very Evil Mother Just Swatted Uncle's Nose" -- for the planets) and yet why not teach the theory of evolution in metre and rhyme?
Great poets, in fact, do teach in this manner. In this very simple ballad, Wordsworth conveys a complex theoretical proposition from Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia: The Laws of Organic Life."