The Cinder Path: Andrew Motion's Shift from Royal to Public Aaisha Mumtaz College

‘I want my writing to be as clear as water. No ornate language; very few obvious tricks. I want readers to be able to see all the way down through its surfaces into the swamp. I want them to feel they’re in a world they thought they knew, but which turns out to be stranger, more charged, more disturbed than they realized.’ (Andrew Motion)

With Andrew Motion, poetry comes as ‘spontaneously’ as it does with William Wordsworth, with no boulders of thoughts blocking the way, with no hindrances creating any trouble and with no obstacles of choosing between subjects to write on. Appointed as Poet Laureate in May 1999, Motion has indeed gained much appreciation for his ‘royal poems’, but this does not limit his vistas of discovery to the few selected topics like the wedding of Prince Edward, the 100th birthday of the Queen Mother or the death of any of the Royal personages. Poetry, for him, is something more than merely trying one’s pen on these topics; it is the ‘supreme art form’, something like a ‘hotline to our deeper feelings’.

If we quickly glance at Motion’s career as a Poet Laureate and take in consideration his ideas of accepting Laureateship as a job, we can fully grasp his views about poetry in particular and how, he...