During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work.

[6] Later he went to Radley College, where, in the sixth form, he encountered Peter Way, an inspiring English teacher who introduced him to poetry – first Thomas Hardy, then Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats.

[14][15] When Motion was 17 years old, his mother had a horse-riding accident and suffered a serious head injury requiring a lifesaving neurosurgery operation.

Breaking with the tradition of the laureate retaining the post for life, Motion stipulated that he would stay for only ten years.

So, he wrote "for the TUC about liberty, about homelessness for the Salvation Army, about bullying for ChildLine, about the foot and mouth outbreak for the Today programme, about the Paddington rail disaster, the 11 September attacks and Harry Patch for the BBC, and more recently about shell shock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change for the song cycle he finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies.

"[20] On 14 March 2002, as part of the 'Re-weaving Rainbows' event of National Science Week 2002, Motion unveiled a blue plaque on the front wall of 28 St Thomas Street, Southwark, to commemorate the sharing of lodgings there by John Keats and Henry Stephens while they were medical students at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in 1815–16.

[23] As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive, an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work.

[24] Motion remarked that he found some of the duties attendant to the post of poet laureate difficult and onerous and that the appointment had been "very, very damaging to [his] work".

[26] As he prepared to stand down from the job, Motion published an article in The Guardian that concluded, "To have had 10 years working as laureate has been remarkable.

[28] Since July 2009, Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Motion was selected as jury chair for the Man Booker Prize 2010[31][32][33] and in March 2010, he announced that he was working with publishers Jonathan Cape on a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

[35][36] Motion's debut play Incoming, about the war in Afghanistan, premièred at the High Tides Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk in May 2011.

The production featured poetry by Motion based on recordings he made of British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[38] In 2017 Motion moved to Baltimore, Maryland to take up a post at the Writing Seminars as a Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.