Word: betjeman
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Books of verse worth looking into: John Betjeman's Slick But Not Streamlined, mildly satiric and pleasing pieces by a little-known Englishman; Stephen Spender's Poems of Dedication, grave and moving but often prosy; Karl Shapiro's Trial of a Poet, explorations into the relation of an isolated poet to an indifferent society...
Once an editor of England's Architectural Review and author of two Shell guidebooks to the English counties (at the moment he is doing another guide to Buckinghamshire), Betjeman is a deliberately "provincial" poet. He has an equal passion for industrial cities and for gaslit towns, entered by bicycle and artfully explored. In his prose Betjeman defends the dignity of places that humorists have poked fun at and social critics have deplored...
Suburbs & Seaside. After three years of fire raids on South London, it was characteristic of Betjeman (who worked at the Admiralty) to celebrate one of the homelier disappearances...
...other poems, apparently as light, readers may find themselves stirred before they know it by nothing more than the spoken clarity and intense local atmosphere of Betjeman's verses. Among his prose pieces are two in which Oxford (Betjeman went to Magdalen College, where his tutor was Author C. S. Lewis) gets the smoothest and most thorough panning of modern times...
...Betjeman, his wife Penelope and their two children live near Wantage (birthplace of Alfred the Great) in Berkshire, in an old rectory designed by Inigo Jones. He farms, earns side money by reviewing books for the London Daily Herald. He would like to be a stationmaster on a small country branch line (single track). But, says he, "journalism is a better way out for weak characters, such as I am, who are slaves to nicotine and drink...