Word: betjeman
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Last week Britain's literate and near-literate were howling to give the present P.L., Sir John Betjeman, the sack. The reason was the verse he had written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was as if the mother tongue of Shakespeare and Milton had lapsed into baby talk. Betjeman's quatrains palpitated with cliches and such treacly rhymes as people/steeple, dutiful/beautiful and blue/true. Stanza 4 particularly captured the poem's schoolboy earnestness...
...with umpires and owners, marital misadventures and a one-season suspension for consorting with known gamblers. Yet if Leo the Lip is to be recalled by future generations, it may be for his signal contribution to literature. There he sits in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, sandwiched between John Betjeman and W.H. Auden: "Nice guys finish last. Leo Durocher (1906-)." As Durocher marches toward the close of the parenthesis, he recalls the flaky, competitive career that made him, for millions of fans, the man they loved to hate...
...Weimar Germany, Iceland, and New York--had ended and he was invited back to Oxford. As a long-time expatriate and as a homosexual, Auden could never have been Poet Laureate. Yet, by the end of his life, he would have been as innocuous a choice as Sir John Betjeman...
London even shed its sodden skies, and the burnished brass and gold leaf of the cavalry and coaches sparkled in the autumn sunshine. About the only sour note was sounded over the commemorative poem written by Sir John Betjeman; it was his first official literary effort since being named Britain's poet laureat. One Labor M.P. described the lyric as "turgid, unromantic and stamped with mediocrity," and called for Betjeman's resignation. The verse...
...PICTORIAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE by John Betjeman. 112 pages. Macmillan. $12.95. British Poet Laureate Betjeman has long been an amateur of architecture. Here he transcends the book's rather tired format to produce an essay that is sublimely confident of its delights and prejudices. Betjeman loves tiny Saxon churches whose masons "captured holy air and encased it in stone." Noting that some of his illustrations of modern buildings are "cautionary examples," he ends with a plea for the survival of the profession of architecture. "We should wish him well," Betjeman writes of the architect, "for he should...