Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984), Poet Laureate of Britain from 1972 to 1984, was the most popular English poet of the 20th century and a familiar personality on British television. John Betjeman was born in London on August 28, 1906, the only child of...

John Betjeman was a unique figure in twentieth-century English poetry, enjoying a degree of fame and success unequaled by any poet since George Gordon, Lord Byron. His Collected Poems of 1958 reputedly sold more than one hundred thousand copies, and...

John Betjeman is a unique figure in twentieth-century English poetry, enjoying a degree of fame and success unequaled by any poet since Byron. His Collected Poems of 1958 reputedly sold more than 100,000 copies, and they are read by millions of people...

John Bejtman developed poems which have been marked by verve, lucidity and point from the composer's perspective. The poet has expressed a passion for putting his poetry into music, an idea he reflected in his desire to be part of the British Music Hall....

The critical fate of John Betjeman is a sharply divided one. His work endures the dubious distinction of being enjoyed by millions of readers, many of whom would never read poetry. In spite of his popularity, which earned him the laureateship in 1972,...

The first customers sipped bubbly at Europe's longest champagne bar and boarded high-speed trains to Paris and Brussels as London's St. Pancras station reopened Wednesday after a seven-year, $1.6 billion refurbishment.Two trains slipped out of the station just after 11 a.m., traveling to Paris in...

[Although] he writes from within the essentially middle-class tradition of English liberal humanism, Betjeman has been a consistently subversive force in modern English poetry, and it is clear from his latest poems that his criticism of English society has taken on an angrier tone. A second element in his writing is the increasingly powerful note of spiritual anguish, a deepening of the religious doubt and despair which was evident in an earlier poem, 'Tregardock', in his volume, High and Low ...

[Betjeman] is the poet of rus in urbe. A good thing, too: the inherent contradictions of the suburb (not to be confused with Academia) too seldom receive a hearing in contemporary literature, despite the number of writers who must live in one. Betjeman celebrates "old brick garden walls" and "the mist of green about the elms / In earliest leaf-time." Alas, mortar crumbles, and leaves fall, and though he's gentle or even affectionately comic in his recording of these change...

Sir John Betjeman is now England's Poet Laureate, and the recent brouhaha over his silver anniversary poem to the Queen is a sign of the dangers of being too public a poet (still, it always seemed to me that if he had to use an adverb to modify her blue eyes, "profoundly" would do as nicely as anything else). But A Nip in the Air proves him to be … an accomplished writer of light verse, with a gusto for ordinary life and an affection for odd angles of vision. Once again we have s...

Examines the poetry of Blake and Betjeman and in what ways their work provides a social critique of the society they lived in.

John Betjeman's poem "In Westminster Abbey" is about a self-absorbed woman who prays at Westminster Abbey for the sake of appearances and to make herself feel important. Betjeman's use of enjambment, alliteration, repetition, assonance, sibilance, metaphor, and imagery bring out the poem's theme of religious hypocrisy.