John Betjeman's Collected Poems [antikvár]

Introduction to First Edition Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, Sir Maurice Bowra remarked to me of John Betjeman, who was then writing such verses as " The 'Varsity Students' Rag " and other juvenilia: " Betjeman has a mind of extraordinary originality; there is no one else remotely like him." He has remained so until the present time, and is now a lonely and arresting figure in modem poetry. Among the many ways in which he differs from most of his fellow-poets is that his poems are commercially successful to his publishers and himself. Mr. John Sparrow, writing a preface to an earlier volmne of Betjeman's poems, truly observed after quoting from the brilliant piece " Sunday in Ireland ": " Plainly what inspired the writer of those stanzas was a sense of place." Elsewhere he said: " In other words he is not a Nature poet, like Wordsworth, but a landscape poet like Crabbe and, like Crabbe, he is the painter of the particular, the recognizable landscape; his trees are not merely real trees with their roots in the earth, they are conifers with their roots in the red sand of Camberley, feathery ash in leathery Lambourne, or forsythia in the Banbury Road." This sense of place, so varied and so tender, has led Betjeman into a calculated risk, that of being typed as the poet of the suburbs, and many have ¦wrongly assumed this addiction to be either a pose XV