John Betjeman

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Standard Name: Betjeman, John
JB was a writer of popular, plangent, often nostalgic poems, who served as Poet Laureate from 1969. He also published an autobiography in blank verse, a novel about a teddy bear, and books and articles on architecture.
Black-and-white photo of John Betjeman, 1961, in profile, looking down as he reads a petition to save Lewisham Town Hall. He is wearing a classic fedora hat and checked tweed jacket.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Occupation Frances Horovitz
Patrick Magee , Harvey Hall , Stevie Smith , Hugh Dickson , and Basil Jones were the other readers for the project. The poets from whose work they read included W. B. Yeats , D. H. Lawrence
Publishing Iris Tree
Poet John Betjeman wrote a short biographical introduction for the poem, in which he refers to its having been passed around privately before publication. Story has it that the book was finally published at the...
Reception Philip Larkin
PL declined the poet laureateship, which was offered him after John Betjeman died (on 19 May 1984), on the grounds that he was no longer a practising poet. His many honorary doctorates included those with...
Reception Kathleen Raine
She stood as a candidate for election as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1968, but was unsuccessful. (Four years later John Betjeman told her that she would have been a better choice for Poet...
Textual Features Philip Larkin
His selection was resolutely unfashionable, favouring Hardy and Betjeman at the expense of Eliot and Pound . He was, however, remarkably generous in his selection of women poets (often for just one or two poems...
Textual Production Iris Tree
John Betjeman (who became Poet Laureate in 1972) writes in his introduction to IT 's long poem The Marsh Picnic, 1966, that she had published another volume of poems in 1919 under the title...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Philip Larkin
The central subject is the period which saw the rise of modernism and its assimilation—or not—into the native English tradition,
Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber, 1993.
502
a tradition represented here by poets from Housman , Hardy , and William Barnes
Theme or Topic Treated in Text G. B. Stern
She begins by quoting in its entirety Robert Browning 's poem entitled Memorabilia, which as she observes is better known by its opening line, Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?
qtd. in
Stern, G. B. . And did he stop and speak to you?. Henry Regnery, 1958.
prelims
She approaches...

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