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The Best Loved Poems of John Betjeman

John Murray, £9.99; ISBN 071956834X
Review first published in the Yorkshire Post, 2006

In the landscape of twentieth-century English poetry, Betjeman seems something of a dinosaur. Although Eliot had published The Waste Land in 1922, while Betjeman was still at boarding school, Betjeman’s work starts (with Mount Zion in 1931) as it means to go on: essentially untouched by vers libre or Modernism itself. And yet, at the same time, he is not a straightforward imitator of the Victorians, parodying their sensibilities as often as he echoes them. His poems have the thumping liveliness of the music hall, with an impressive range of metrical effects; they turn their attention outwards, on the world, rather than inwards on language, cheerfully ignoring any connection between the two that might have been troubling Betjeman’s contemporaries. In fact, in their rather brisk and guileless employment of words, we might better call them ‘entertainment’ than ‘poetry’ – and this is perhaps one key to their enduring appeal.

Betjeman himself moved up in the world, and he draws material from both his middle-class background and the upper-class circles he joined at Oxford. His distaste for ugly provinciality – ‘Come, friendly bombs, and drop on Slough’ – is balanced by a lusty admiration for English beauty, and his satires of adult weakness – the Porker who is ‘all pedigree and purse’ – sit alongside dreamily fond evocations of childhood. All his most famous characters appear in this reissued selection: Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, the odious ‘Executive’, long-lost Myfanwy; but the strongest personality we become acquainted with by reading Betjeman’s work is his own. Good-humoured, Anglican, occasionally morbid, and clinging with all his power and charm to an age already gone, it is Betjeman we see in ‘Death of King George V’, when he describes ‘Old men who never cheated, never doubted, / Communicated monthly, sit and stare / At the new suburb stretched beyond the runway / Where a young man lands hatless from the air.’