Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a poet and critic. His most successful book, The Savage God, was a study of suicide and included a description of his own failed attempt.

At first it seems a surprising subject for a man who with his taste for rock climbing and poker

has otherwise displayed an energetic appetite for living.

His first love though is literature, a brilliant student, a successful academic and a highly influential poetry editor of the observer,

in the 50s and 60s he helped to success some of the best known writers of the post-war era,

Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plathath and Robert Lowell among them.

Reflecting on all this, he says,

My first 30 years when almost nothing went right were purgatory.

The last 40 have passed in no time at all. Here's Al-Alvares. Does the suicide

attempt then, Al, which seems to have been the watershed, if you like, between these two sections

of your life?

Does it now seem like a ghastly aberration,

or can you still touch into the desperation?

I find it very difficult to get to that.

I don't think the depression went away.

I think I was probably depressed for a long time before and after.

But it does seem as though it was done by somebody else. I think I sit in the sandwich

guard that, you know, it was as though you know some of I had

died for all I knew I had died and this was someone completely different.

And I think you also say that it's as if the boy owl swallowed the pills it was that the man

...