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 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet, acclaimed in literary circles, she's won both the Somerset Morm and

W.H. Smith prizes, she's also been awarded the CBE. Despite this fame, she

lives in modest circumstances in Oxford where she grew up and

where just after the war she went to university. Each day she leaves her

cluttered rented room and travels to a local cafe where she spreads out her papers and works.

It is in these unassuming circumstances or at home in bed that she's written much of the work

which one distinguished critic has called some of the finest lyric poetry of the 20th century.

She is Elizabeth Jennings.

Elizabeth do you think you are always destined to be a poet or did you have some choice in the matter?

No it wasn't until reading poetry at school.

I was really very lucky in my education

when poetry hit me and I became hooked on it.

Was it always poetry that you wrote?

Were you never tempted to write prose?

No, I think I did try to write stories.

And since I've tried to write novels twice and I can't do it.

But the poetry just pours out, I understand. I've tried to write novels twice and I can't do it.

But the poetry just pours out, I understand.

Not now.

Doesn't it?

...