Word: betjeman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...British have aged and mellowed their institution of poet laureate for three centuries. Some who read the effusions of the present laureate, Sir John Betjeman, think that the process is better described as decay. Two weeks agd, when the Queen Mother turned 80, Sir John released a poem of celebration: "We are your people,/ Millions of us greet you/ On this your birthday/ Mother of our Queen." This defiantly wooden psalming was merely average Betjeman. Years ago, the death of King George V inspired the young Betjeman to a soaring metaphysical conception: "Spirits of well-shot woodcock, partridge, snipe/ Flutter...
...politics. "Architecture or revolution!" he wrote, at the turbulent beginning of the '20s. Consequently men like Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier were prone to see themselves not only as prophets but as lawgivers, and their tracts were filled with a lofty utopianism. The dream was neatly parodied by John Betjeman...
What Liverpudlians got for their generosity is no mere ostentatious pile of stone. The cathedral's clean, neo-Gothic lines and interior have already been widely praised; Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman, a connoisseur of architecture, pronounced it "one of great buildings of the world." Yet its architect, a Roman Catholic named Giles Scott, was a 22-year-old unknown when he chosen from among 102 competitors in 1903. Later Scott go on to design London's Waterloo Bridge and the massive Battersea power station, and to rebuild the bomb-gutted House of Commons after World...