Selected Poems by Sir John Betjeman

Selected Poems Reviews

• 
  Nile

  I remember reading last year a preface to a collection of Persian poetry where the English compiler implied the English language is in all senses two-thousand years behind the Iranians when it comes to poetry and while that might seem a little bombastic I've yet to read an English poet who doesn't prove the rule.
  
  This collection has a few moments but it was on the whole the epitome of the sort of dullness the English reclassify as comfortable and homely. Homely perhaps being the best term given to some it means a rustic idyll and to others a plain nothing.
  
  Betjeman writes a passable love poem I will give him that, but it is more than counterbalanced by an overwhelming streak of a snob and a (hypocritical) prig elsewhere.
• 
  Rachel

  I did the same thing for Betjeman as I did for Byron: picked a small, pretty volume to try out before committing to the mammoth collected works. I liked Betjeman (In a Bath Teashop is still a - if not the - favourite poem of mine) and especially enjoyed what Hugo Williams defined as “a poet who routinely put our needs before his own, an unfashionable priority in the aftermath of modernism.” By which I mean he's interested in form and using form and not just vomiting up all the feelings he ever had on to one messy page. But in the finish I feel he reads like cut-price Auden, and none of the subject matter is compelling enough for me to read 500 more pages of it.
  
  Margate, 1940
  
  And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,
  It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all.
  
  
  Felixstowe, or The Last of Her Order
  
  With one consuming roar along the shingle
  The long wave claws and rakes the pebbles down
  To where its backwash and the next wave mingle,
  A mounting arch of water weedy-brown
  
  Pershore Station, or a Liverish Journey First Class
  
  They were ringing them down for Evensong in the lighted abbey near,
  Sounds which had poured through apple boughs for seven centuries here.
  
  Inevitable
  
  His final generosity when almost insurmountable
  The barriers and mountains he has crossed again must be.
  
  
  The Cockney Amorist
  
  I love you, oh my darling,
  And what I can’t make out
  Is why since you have left me
  I’m somehow still about.
  
  
  
  Aldershot Crematorium
  
  “I am the Resurrection and the Life”:
  Strong, deep and painful, doubt inserts the knife.
  
  
  
  Favs: The Wykehamist; An Impoverished Irish Peer; A Shropshire Lad; Myfanwy (she sounds awesome); A Subaltern’s Love-Song; In a Bath Teashop; Late-Flowering Lust (ouch); Original Sin on the Sussex Coast (a good description of bullying); Winthrop Mackworth Redivivus; Reproof Deserved, or After the Lecture; Executive OUCH
• 
  Stuart Goodwin

  Not a major poet but a Great Man.