Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a poet and a writer. Born in Lincoln, the son of a clergyman,

he went via public school to Oxford,

where, appropriately, he walked off

with the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

As a foreign correspondent, he traveled with the Viet Cong when they captured Saigon and fled

from the Khmer Rouge when they entered Plonpen.

He's worked as a political and literary journalist and as a theatre critic. Many of those experiences are

recounted in his poetry which ranges like that of his hero, W.H. Audans, from

song to dramatic verse. He is the professor of poetry at Oxford, James Fenton. So the professor

of poetry was a foreign correspondent and a political animal too. I mean it sounds like an odd

combination, is it?

Well, if you decide to write poetry in life,

it's improbable you're going to spend all your time writing poetry,

so you set out to have something else. all your

bread and butter, to keep you busy.

A proper job.

For the rest of the time.

A proper job, yes, that's right. And I looked for all kinds of proper jobs. I was

going to be a clinical psychologist, but I wasn't good enough at it. So then I went into

journalism. Going into journalism I thought

...