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

The former poet laureate on growing up with Lawrence Durrell, rereading Henry James and getting to grips with the genius of Alexander Pope

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.