Andrew Motion Quotes

• O Jonny the power of your boot And the accurate heart-stopping route Of your goal as it ghosts Through Australian posts Is a triumph we gladly salute.

  Andrew Motion

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• Earth’s axle creeks; the year jolts on; the trees begin to slip their brittle leaves, their flakes of rust; and darkness takes the edge off daylight, not because it wants to-never that. Because it must.

  Andrew Motion

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.

  Andrew Motion

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• You see the names of places roundabout? They’re mine now, and I’ve turned them inside out.

  Andrew Motion

• While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of ‘difficult’ poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there’s room for ‘difficult’ poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won’t be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.

  Andrew Motion

• 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.

  Andrew Motion

• 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.

  Andrew Motion

• Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

  Andrew Motion

• Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticised by Auberon Waugh.

  Andrew Motion

• Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

  Andrew Motion

• These places, and the ancient things you know, You won’t know soon. I’m working on it now.’

  Andrew Motion

• There are plenty of examples of people who have had busy lives out there in the world, trying to do good, and written very well at the same time.

  Andrew Motion

• The best public poems aren’t necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

  Andrew Motion

• 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.

  Andrew Motion

• Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

  Andrew Motion

• Pretty much every weekend, my wife and I have the shall-we-live-in-the-country conversation. I suppose it’s something to do with getting older and feeling I want to shed some of the things I’ve been doing for the last 20 years and go back to my roots.

  Andrew Motion

• 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.

  Andrew Motion

• More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

  Andrew Motion

• Like a lot of people, for a long time I thought that the road to hell is paved with bad sequels.

  Andrew Motion

• 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.

  Andrew Motion

Andrew Motion (52)

Birth:	26th October, 1952
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Poet

About

Sir Andrew Motion was born in London. He is 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, Sir Andrew became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson. Between 1976 and 1980, Motion taught English at the University of Hull and while there, at age 24, he had his first volume of poetry published. Motion was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus, he edited the Poetry Society's Poetry Review from 1980–1982 and succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Motion has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1831 - Mark Rutherford
• 1949 - Maurice Gibb
• 1943 - Paul Wolfowitz
• 1938 - Lucien Bouchard
• 1952 - Robert McChesney

Deaths

• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton
• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody
• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1906 - Robert Rainy
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett