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
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Broodingly suggestive of Donne's intellectual figure as well as his witty sensuality, it is also a picture of great intrinsic beauty and the bewitching evocation of an age. The National Portrait Gallery is its natural home. The picture is cheap at the price, and if we don't buy it someone else will.
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The readings are at once instant in their appeal, and lingering in their impact.
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I write between 5.30am and 9.00. That way, I hope I carry over something from my dream time.
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It is extremely desolating news that he should have died when he was only 68 and always seemed so much younger,
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Each sudden gust of light explains itselfas flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear (Leaving Belfast)
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This is a book written by someone obsessed, stricken and deeply loving. There is nothing like it in literature.
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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,
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When you're being looked at very hard, it's very hard to look back. And that made me stop paying attention to the world in a way that allowed me then to write about it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.
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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.'