John Betjeman
born Aug. 28, 1906, London, Eng.
died May 19, 1984, Trebetherick, Cornwall
British poet known for his nostalgia for
the near past, his exact sense of place, and
his precise rendering of social nuance,
which made him widely read in England at a
time when much of what he wrote about was
rapidly vanishing. The poet, in
near-Tennysonian rhythms, satirized lightly
the promoters of empty and often destructive
“progress” and the foibles of his own
comfortable class. As an authority on
English architecture and topography, he did
much to popularize Victorian and Edwardian
building and to protect what remained of it
from destruction.
The son of a prosperous businessman,
Betjeman grew up in a London suburb, where
T.S. Eliot was one of his teachers. He later
studied at Marlborough College (a public
school) and Magdalen College, Oxford. The
years from early childhood until he left
Oxford were detailed in Summoned by Bells
(1960), blank verse interspersed with
lyrics.
Betjeman’s first book of verse, Mount
Zion, and his first book on architecture,
Ghastly Good Taste, appeared in 1933.
Churches, railway stations, and other
elements of a townscape figure largely in
both books. Four more volumes of poetry
appeared before the publication of Collected
Poems (1958). His later collections were
High and Low (1966), A Nip in the Air
(1974), Church Poems (1981), and Uncollected
Poems (1982). Betjemen’s celebration of the
more settled Britain of yesteryear seemed to
touch a responsive chord in a public that
was suffering the uprootedness of World War
II and its austere aftermath.
Betjeman’s prose works include several
guidebooks to English counties; First and
Last Loves (1952), essays on places and
buildings; The English Town in the Last
Hundred Years (1956); and English Churches
(1964; with Basil Clarke). He was knighted
in 1969, and in 1972 he succeeded C.
Day-Lewis as poet laureate of England.
