John Betjeman (1906-1984) was a courageous poet, courageous for the right reasons. Many poets are courageous for speaking to controversial social issues, or proposing counter-cultural ways of living, or denigrating God and religion. John Betjeman was courageous because he didn’t hide his affection for the Protestant church. This is not to say that he was happily submissive to the institutional church, nor even that he was an Evangelical (or even Orthodox) believer.
He became England’s poet laureate in 1972. Everyone who knew who he was, knew that he loved the church. They also knew that, in many ways, he missed the church of his past. England of the 60s and 70s was experiencing a more-than-waning interest in the institutional church. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, John Stott, and J. I. Packer were certainly preaching Evangelicalism in Betjeman’s home city for much of his career, London (though he would later relocate to the coast). Betjeman had a rocky relationship with C. S. Lewis from his school days in Oxford, but he had a better one with fellow poet, T. S. Eliot. I hope to study Betjeman more closely, particularly with regard to these relationships.
Betjeman was not too important or sophisticated to write about very ordinary things (buildings, cars, commercial products, city planning, etc.) or about very ordinary experiences (school bullies, visiting a new city, dining in a restaurant, etc.). I like him for these reasons. Yet, I like him very much because he was not afraid to write about ordinary life in the church. He did not always write with lilting favor, but he was not ashamed to enfold the church naturally, as if she were always there, and always would be.
Below are my favorites in the standard collection of John Betjeman poems (mine is The Collected Poems, London, 1975). You can find several of these online, but it isn’t always easy.
- "In Westminster Abbey," pp. 91-92.
- "N.W. 5 & N. 6," pp. 288-89.
- "Inevitable," pp. 284-85
- "Hertfordshire," pp. 280-81
- "Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class," pp. 278-79
- "Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station," pp. 270-71
- "Original Sin on the Sussex Coast," pp. 218-220
- "Huxley Hall," pp. 199-200
- "The Town Clerk's Views," pp. 177-80
- "St. Saviour's, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N.," pp. 154-56.
- "In a Bath Teashop," p. 129
- "Slough," pp. 22-24
- "Distant View of a Provincial Town,” p. 20
