Andrew Motion Quotes

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.

Rarely do you meet an American who knows his Wordsworth.

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

My thesis at school was on Wordsworth.

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

Milton, thou should'st be living at this hour.

I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips

When Byron's eyes were shut in death, We bow'd our head and held our breath. He taught us little; but our soul Had felt his like a thunder roll. . . . We watch'd the fount of fiery life Which serv'd for that Titanic life.

Of the authors writing in English, I'd mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I'm afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world.

I've never been that keen on Shakespeare.

My life has included a study of Shakespeare and to me it's very natural, but I know that it's not always accessible to other people.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

Not every gay person recites poetry or has read Keats. You can get readers through anything if the characters are complicated. You can't dismiss Josey Wales' quite liberal worldview.

Shakespeare is the one who gets re-interpreted most frequently.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.