John Betjeman's Collected Poems
by John Betjeman
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Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough To get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now; The earth exhales. --from "Slough" When the beloved English poet John Betjeman's Collected Poems first appeared in 1958, it made publishing history, and has now sold more than two million copies to a steadily expanding readership. Betjeman is almost unique among poets in that his work appeals equally strongly to those who love poetry and to those who rarely read it. This volume, the first show more American edition of the Collected Poems, incorporates all the poems that Betjeman published after the original Collected Poems and includes a new foreword by Britain's poet laureate, Andrew Motion. show lessTags
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A leading modern champion of the values of an older England, John Betjeman was born in Highgate, London, to a well-off merchant family. The loneliness and suffering of his upbringing, first under nursemaids and then at a series of schools, often surface in his poetry. He went to Magdalene College, Oxford, where he belonged to the same smart social show more set as Evelyn Waugh. Deliberately free from the difficulties of much modern verse, Betjeman's poetry harks back to a more accessible British tradition that includes Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy. With quiet wit he resisted the debasements of modern mass culture in favor of an older England simpler, more rural, and more religious than the current one. Both W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin especially admired his work, and Auden even edited a selection of it. His harsher critics have found him unintellectual and sentimental. His poetry has achieved a huge circulation in Great Britain, with the Collected Poems (1958) reputedly selling more than 100,000 copies. Considered a national institution, he succeeded Cecil Day Lewis as poet laureate in 1972. Betjeman worked in a variety of media and achieved wide public attention as host for a television series on the history of British architecture, one of his prime interests. He wrote a great deal on architecture, especially for the Architectural Review. Betjeman died in 1984. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Alternate titles
- Collected Poems
- Original publication date
- 1958
- Quotations
- I had forgotten Hertfordshire,
The large unwelcome fields of roots
Where with my knickerbockered sire
I trudged in syndicated shoots
And that unlucky day when I
Fired by mistake into the ground
Under a L... (show all)ionel Edwards sky
And felt disapprobation round.
[Betjeman] is not a Nature poet, like Wordsworth, but a landscape poet like Crabbe and, like Crabbe, he is the painter of the particular, the recognisable landscape. (John Sparrow) - Disambiguation notice
- "Compiled and with an introduction by the Earl of Birkenhead. This consisted of a selection of Betjeman's poems, rather than a collection of all his work;there have been numerous reprints, some of which have provided addition... (show all)al works for inclusion"
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Statistics
- Members
- 483
- Popularity
- 62,408
- Rating
- (3.96)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 19
- ASINs
- 39
