Andrew Motion: ‘Wilfred Owen became a kind of sacred text for me’

My earliest reading memory
My parents were country people who thought that looking after or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say that he’d read half a book in his life (The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes), and while my mother got through three or four novels a year, she didn’t expect me to do anything equivalent. But I do remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I must have been seven or so, and thought it was amusing and ingenious.

The books that changed me as a teenager
At my first school, I somehow got my hands on White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell, which my parents thought was unsuitably violent. I never finished it, but enjoyed carrying it around as proof of how grown-up I was. Then, at my secondary school, my history teacher read us some Wilfred Owen (we were studying the first world war), and the poetry-lights in my mind immediately flickered on. When I subsequently bought Owen’s Collected Poems it became a kind of sacred text for me (it still is).

The book that made me want to be a writer
I’m not sure that I ever “wanted to be a writer” until I found that I was one: it had previously seemed too outlandish a possibility. But I did begin to tinker with poems of my own while I foraged through my excellent A-level poetry anthology: Theme and Variations, edited by RB Heath (1965). Despite its austerely unsexy title, this book made me feel like Carter breaking into Tutankhamun’s tomb.

The author I came back to
Alexander Pope. The first poem I read by him was An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, which baffled me with its multiple references to things and people I’d never heard of, I couldn’t see what a genius of thought and technique he is. Fifty years later he’s one of the poets I most admire.

The books I reread
Wordsworth’s The Prelude, in its earlier two versions, and John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs: two poetic autobiographies which both feel to me like the breath of life. Almost all the novels I reread are by Henry James, the fiction writer I prefer to all others, and whose later work becomes more important to me year by year.

The book I could never read again
JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I liked it so much the first time round (in my late teens), I even read it at breakfast. Now, however warmly I respond to its warnings about tyrannical power, I find I have no appetite for that kind of narrative. My loss, I dare say.

The book I discovered late in life
There are a lot of them – especially novels, since I’ve always preferred to read poems. Among nonfiction books, I’m especially glad to have read Galen Strawson’s Things That Bother Me. It changed the way I think about how I live in time.

The book I’m currently reading
I tend to have more than one book on the go at once: this week I’m reading The Collected Poems of George Oppen and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. It’s a lot more enjoyable than it might sound.

My comfort read
I more often read to experience a certain kind of dis-comfort rather than comfort, since I prefer books that provoke me. But everything by Elizabeth Bishop – the prose, the poems and the letters – contains plenty of both. And a great deal else besides.