Betjeman, John (1906-1984) poet

John Betjeman was born in London to Ernest Edward Betjeman, a businessman, and Mabel Bessie Betjeman. His parents fought constantly, and Betjeman was raised almost solely by a nanny. He went to a number of private elementary and preparatory schools, even studying under T. S. Eliot at one point, but left Oxford after failing an important exam. He worked as a teacher at several high schools and for the Ministry of Information during World War II. However, his main goal was to be a poet.

Betjeman spent the better part of the 1930s supporting himself by writing for the magazine Architectural Review and producing several travel guides. In addition he wrote his first two volumes of poetry, Mount Zion (1931) and Continual Dew (1937), which featured subjects, including architecture, landscapes, religion, and death, that would become standard in his work. This early work also displayed his characteristically nostalgic tone.

With his first two collections virtually unrecognized by both critics and the public, Betjeman’s reputation improved only slightly with the appearance of Old Lights for New Chancels (1940), New Bats in Old Belfries (1945), and A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954). In 1958, however, with the publication of Collected Poems, he finally captured the interest of the popular reading public and the literary establishment. In this collection of previously published poetry, he demonstrated himself to be a poet remarkably untouched by the aesthetics of modernist poets such as Eliot. Among his influences was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Instead of the experimentation and free verse of many of his contemporaries, Betjeman adopted traditional verse forms and presented what critic Louise Bogan described as “an entire set of neglected Victorian techniques . . . immediately acceptable even to our modern sensibilities, grown used to the harsh, the violent, and the horrifying.”

Collected Poems contains two of Betjeman’s most enduring poems: “Slough” and “The Metropolitan Railway.” “Slough” is an example of what some critics call Betjeman’s “light,” or less serious verse. In great detail, it describes a dull suburban town, that “isn’t fit for humans now, / There isn’t grass to graze a cow.” Regardless of the poem’s “lightness,” or perhaps because of it, it has been widely anthologized.

“The Metropolitan Railway” confronts progress and the price paid for it. The poem begins with a husband and wife on a bright and shiny metro platform but changes direction with the lines “visualize, far down the shining lines / Your parents’ homestead set in murmuring pines.” Betjeman shows how this earlier generation might have experienced the railroad on their first ride and describes how it entirely changed the face of the British countryside. In the last stanza the poem returns to the present, in which the husband has died of cancer and the wife has a bad heart. Both have been abandoned by the promise of progress that seemed so wonderful in their youth.

Another of Betjeman’s best poems, “In Willes- den Churchyard,” appears in High and Low (1966). In this poem the speaker walks among the headstones of a cemetery with his “love” and ponders the lives of the people lying beneath his feet. He ultimately arrives at questions about his own death. The poem ends with the lines, “Not ten yards off in Willesden parish church / Glows with the present immanence of God,” but it suggests uncertainty rather than reassurance about death, even with the presence of God near at hand.

Betjeman was a popular poet, with his Collected Poems selling more than 100,000 copies in a time when poetry was commonly regarded as remote and sometimes unreadable. He was poet laureate from 1972 until his death and received numerous honorary degrees. While some critics question Betjeman’s poetic skill, others see him as a worthy heir of 19th-century poetry. As Louise Bogan remarks, “it is a pleasure to let down our defenses and be swept along . . . and to meet no imperfect . . . rhymes . . .; to recognize sincerity so delicately shaded . . . that it becomes immediately acceptable even to our modern sensibilities.”

Other Works by John Betjeman:
- English Cities and Small Towns. 1943. Reprint, London: Prion, 1997.
- John Betjeman: Collected Poems. London: John Murray, 1990.

Works about John Betjeman:
- Brown, Dennis. John Betjeman. Tavistock, England: Northcote, 1999.
- Wilson, A. N. Betjeman. New York: Arrow, 2007.