The Best of Betjeman [antikvár]

Editor's Note There is one obvious omission from the poetry selected for this book: I have not quoted from Summoned hy Bells. This blank-verse autobiographical poem is more than a hundred pages long, and is inevitably more relaxed in style than the shorter poems. I have been limited for space, and to have included passages that adequately represented the mood and manner of Summoned by Bells would have entailed the elimination of a number of shorter poems. I can only urge readers to obtain Summoned by Bells and to read it in its entirety. There was an earlier volume of Sir John Betjeman's essays and radio talks - mostly on topographical and architectural subjects -selected by Mrs John Piper and published in 1952 under the title, First and Last Loves. To this I am indebted for four pieces in the selection that follows. Nearly half a century has passed since the appearance in the London Mercury of the first prose item in this book,' Lord Mount Prospect'. Publication dates have therefore been supplied throughout so that the poems and passages of prose may be read in the light, as it were, of their various decades. I make no apology for including in Part Two what may appear to be a rather big selection from one source, the Introduction to English Parish Churches (Collins, 1958). This essay, half the length of a book in itself, is of great importance in the body of Sir John's prose writings. And, on a lesser matter, I make no apology for including the piece on Theo Marzials. Readers may feel that it con-. tains as much quotation as original Betjeman; it does, but the pleasure it gives as a whole justifies, I hope, its inclusion here. To the great number of readers who for many years have enjoyed Sir John's poetry, essays and radio talks, there has recently been added a vast new public through the medium of television. As a script writer and as a visible narrator, he has proved himself 'a natural' in this relatively new field. I have therefore thought it valid H