Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion, FRSLis an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 October 1952
centre life people poetry speaking stuff
Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.
ideals keats poems says wants
Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.
absolutely believe keats means proved saying tells until
When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
history human people poetry reading time
More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.
knows mind nature obligation poems poetry resist side wish work written
I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
These places, and the ancient things you know, You won't know soon. I'm working on it now.'
best poems public subject
The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.
poetry
In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.
hesitation
I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.
absolute people
I think it is interesting to think about the absolute animal relish young people have for rhythm and rhyme.
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Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding, there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground, poets in schools, football clubs, zoos.
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Actors may (or may not) read poems well, but poets have unique rights to their work, and unique insights and interests to offer as we hear their idiom, pacing, tone and emphases,
book deeply literature stricken written
This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving. There is nothing like it in literature.
I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.