

'No writing is as hard as this' - poet laureate
The poet laureate Andrew Motion
The poet laureate Andrew Motion. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Andrew Motion, the first poet laureate to retire voluntarily in nearly 400 years, has admitted in a valedictory essay that the eight royal poems he wrote in his 10 years in the post were the most difficult of his life.

The poet, who unleashed A Celebration of the Queen Mother's 100th Birthday in 2000: "My dream of your birthday/ Is more like a wedding,/ The August sky?/ Confused with confetti,/ No, not with confetti ..." and a commemoration of Prince Charles's marriage to Camilla in 2005: "I took your news outdoors and strolled a while/ In silence in my square of garden-ground", admits in the Guardian today that he turned down the chance to write more poems on subjects for which he felt no empathy.

"I have to admit that no other writing that I've undertaken, of any kind, has been so difficult. The problem is partly to do with the subjects (if "subject" is quite the word for someone who is not a subject). How was I to connect with them, knowing only what newspapers tell me? How was I to steer an appropriate course between familiarity (which would seem presumptuous) and sycophancy (which would seem absurd)?

"And how was I to weigh and value them, knowing that a large part of the population doesn't want there to be a royal family, or feels indifferent to it?" he writes, without quite admitting whether he is of their number.

Motion, who receives £5,000 a year rather than the customary honorarium of a barrel of wine, agreed to be appointed poet laureate for 10 years in 1999, in contrast to his predecessors who all died in office, except for the 17th-century dramatist John Dryden (who was sacked).

His eight official poems also included odes on the death of the Queen Mother and the Queen's golden jubilee and her diamond wedding anniversary.

The pressure to write apparently did not come from the monarch herself, whose views on poetry, as on most other subjects, remain opaque. "The first time I met the Queen she said the same thing as Tony Blair, whom I'd also just met for the first time: 'You don't have to do anything.' "

Instead, as usual, the media were to blame, by insisting on verse, or worse, on every conceivable occasion. "You'll just have to take my word for it: every time there's been a royal birth or wedding or death in the past 10 years, a terrible low rumble has begun in newsrooms across the country. A rumble that has led to some people ringing me up to ask whether I'm 'thinking of doing something'. The voice at the other end of the line puts the question in such a way as to make me feel that I'll be castigated as an idle, sherry-swilling republican if I don't take the top off my pen and start rhyming at once."

Despite his agent assiduously circulating his efforts, even then the agony did not stop: "News editors don't think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn't like the poem - then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem."

Motion says he has used the post to publicise poetry and to broaden the remit to write about other issues, such as homelessness, liberty, the Paddington rail disaster, 9/11 and Harry Patch, the last survivor from the trenches of the first world war.

Despite everything, the royal family has appreciated his work too. "I've certainly never looked for thanks from the royal family and have only been surprised and touched when it has come (which it has, from the Queen, Prince Charles and - for the poem I wrote about her 100th birthday - the late Queen Mother)."

There is, though, just one small regret. "I wish ... that someone had flown me to Iraq and Afghanistan and encouraged me to write about the wars in those places."