Word: betjeman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Despite its history, in 1966 the government announced it would merge St. Pancras with Kings Cross, demolishing the former in favour of a sports center and social housing. But a campaign led by the then poet laureate Sir John Betjeman galvanized public opinion already stung by the demolition of the nearby old Euston station a few years earlier...
...Letters to the London Times, sit-ins and the pleas of Betjeman eventually persuaded the bureaucrats to stop the bulldozers a mere 10 days before demolition day, but that didn't halt the area's decline. For the last three decades, the area surrounding St. Pancras has become infamous as a haven for the homeless, prostitutes and drug dealers. Anyone unfortunate enough to have to walk through its streets tended to quicken their step. The inspiration for its redemption came from the across the Atlantic...
...particularly regarding homely, accessible subject matter, in two novels (Jill, 1946, and A Girl in Winter, 1947) and four spare collections of verse published at roughly ten- year intervals. He shunned the readings, lectures and interviews that increasing fame brought him. The overwhelming favorite to succeed Poet Laureate John Betjeman after his death in 1984, Larkin refused to comment on reports that he had been offered the post (which eventually went to Ted Hughes) and turned it down...
...Poetry, for Larkin, is emphatically "an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are." For him the two writers who have done that best in recent times are Thomas Hardy ("many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show") and John Betjeman, the last laureate, who is cited as "a poet for whom the modern poetic revolution has simply not taken place...
...John Betjeman's death last month has left...