Andrew Motion: ‘Wilfred Owen became a sacred text for me’ | books

My first memory is reading
My parents were country people who thought it was more fun to look after or chase animals than to read: my father used to say he had read half a book in his life (Hammond Innes’s The Only Skater), and while my mother read three or four novels a year, she never expected me to do anything similar. But I remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Janet. I must have been seven or so, and I thought it was entertaining and genius.

Books that changed me as a teenager
At my first school, I somehow got into the novel White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell, which my father thought was inappropriately violent. I never finished it, but I enjoyed holding it as a sign of my maturity. Then, in my high school, my history teacher read us some of Wilfred Owen’s poems (we were studying World War I), and the poetry lights in my mind immediately lit up. When I later bought Owen’s Collected Poems, it became a kind of sacred text for me (and still is).

The book that made me want to be a writer
I’m not sure I “wanted to be a writer” until I discovered I was one: this prospect had previously seemed so foreign. But I really began to tinker with my own poems while researching my excellent A-level poetry anthology: Theme and Variations, edited by R. B. Heath (1965). Despite its somewhat unexciting title, this book made me feel like Carter was breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb.

the Author I have returned to
Alexander the Pope. The first poem I read was A Letter to Dr. Arbuthnot, which baffled me with its many references to things and people I had never heard of, and I could not see the genius of his thought and technique. Fifty years later, he is one of the poets I admire most.

Books I re-read
Wordsworth’s “Introduction,” in two earlier versions, and John Berryman’s “77 Dream Songs”: two poetic autobiographies that seem to me like a breath of life. Most of the novels I reread are by Henry James, the fiction writer I favor above all others, and whose later works become more important to me year after year.

The book that I could never read again
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I loved it so much the first time (in my late teens), I even read it over breakfast. Now, although I respond warmly to her warnings about authoritarian power, I find that I don’t want to take up that kind of narrative. My loss, dare I say.

The book I discovered late in life
There’s a lot of it, especially novels, because I’ve always preferred reading poems. Among nonfiction books, I’m particularly glad I read Galen Strowson’s “Things That Annoy Me.” It has changed the way I think about the way I live in time.

The book I’m currently reading
I tend to pick up more than one book at a time: this week I’m reading The Collected Poems of George Oppen and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. It’s more fun than it may seem.

Please read
I read often to experience a certain type of DisComfort is more than comfort. I prefer books that provoke me. But everything Elizabeth Bishop wrote—prose, poems, and letters—contains plenty of both. And many other things besides that.