Just sent this to the bbc
|Re: Wordsworth's Prelude 4 October, 1998 Radio 4
|Until it began I had no idea that you were broadcasting Wordsworth's
|Prelude. I was extremely pleased and sat down to concentrate upon it.
|How is that then that I am writing to you about it even as it still plays?
|What idiocy to add incidental music and sound effects such as bird song! It
|just gets in the way of the poetry which will provide its own music and
|sound effects.
|Were the poetry itself, as poetry, your main concern, then we might have a
|more imaginative reading. It reminds me of Jess Yates introducing hymns -
to
|be fair, on one of his less unctuous days. Again and again, he misses what
|would seem to me to be the proper stress, following the underlying beat
|rather than the verse's movement. He is telling a story and arguing a case,
|not praying.
|And could you not have found someone with a more appropriate accent?
|And so we slouch towards National Poetry Day.
|Lawrence Upton
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