Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet, now the professor of creative writing at East Anglia University,

he's won many of the top literary prizes, not just for his poems, but for his biographies of other writers too, particularly his life of Philip Larkin,

which came out in 1993.

He's written poems since he was a child,

but his childhood itself was dominated by an accident that happened to his mother

while she was out riding. It was, he says, the greatest defining thing of my life.

Everything that's happened since has happened in relation to it in some way or another.

His latest work, a life of John Keats, has been immensely well received, but its author still thinks of himself

as a poet rather than a biographer. He writes a poem every month,

a process he describes as absolutely primitive, emotional, basic. He is Andrew Motion.

Is it as biological a process as that makes it sound Andrew?

It does make it sound of it biological putting it like that doesn't it, but I've always have felt about writing poems that it was as you quote me saying an entirely visceral thing

Which is to put it another way

Something that happens out of a part of your mind that does know what it's doing and is educated and manipulative and interventionist and sophisticated all of that.

But are you aware of that going on?

Is it, does on? Not much.

So it's in gestation as well, but you don't know it's there.

Well, what happens with me is that that side of my mind manages to strike up some sort of relationship with the side of my mind,

which is the primeval swamp, very murky and the bubbles in it of things coming up from God knows where in my unconscious, subconscious.

And that somehow a relationship is created between that as it were ignorant part of my mind

...