Word: betjeman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
DIED. John Betjeman, 77, poet laureate of Britain whose whimsical light verse and nostalgic odes to genteel Edwardian England won him uncommon popular success; in Trebetherick, Cornwall. The son of a prosperous businessman, Betjeman flunked out of Oxford and worked in a variety of jobs, from journalist to insurance salesman, before his Selected Poems (1948) won the prestigious Heinemann Award. Critics were divided on Betjeman's poetry; many found it trivial or derivative, perhaps because of its simple musical rhymes and accessible themes. An astute architectural critic, he waged passionate campaigns to preserve England's historical treasures...
...noble lords can be worked into the structure of a people's monarchy, where is its laureate to be found? The official poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, does his best, but cannot easily switch from his accustomed gentle irony to the suitably adulatory celebration of a royal love match. Here, however, fate has been kind; Lady Diana's step-grandmother Barbara Cartland has written some 300 successful novels in which the hero and heroine, after some troubled times, marry and live happily ever after. Now 80 and buoyed up by honey and vitamin pills, this estimable lady still...