Author: John BetjemanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
John Betjeman's Collected Poems
Author: John BetjemanJohn Betjeman Collected Poems
Author: John BetjemanPublisher: John Murray
ISBN: 1444725297
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 486
Book Description
Collected Poems made publishing history when it first appeared, and has now sold more than two million copies, to an ever-growing readership. This newly expanded edition includes Betjeman's verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells. With a new Introduction by Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, Collected Poems is the definitive Betjeman companion.
Summoned by Bells
Author: John BetjemanPublisher:
ISBN: 9780719522208
Category : Poets, English
Languages : en
Pages : 100
Book Description
Tells the story of a boy's growth to early manhood, seaside holidays, meddling arts, school bullies and an unexpected moment of religious awakening.
Harvest Bells
Author: John BetjemanPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472966392
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
A charming new collection of previously unpublished and uncollected poems by Sir John Betjeman. John Betjeman's unforgettable poems on landscape and suburbia, desire and death, faith and doubt, helped to establish him as the beloved voice of a nation. Yet the ten books of poetry he published individually, later assembled in the Collected Poems, were an incomplete representation of his poetic oeuvre. Many poems published in journals or magazines were excluded from Betjeman's books by him or his editors and a substantial number of finished poems were never printed at all, remaining unknown to readers – until now. In this exquisite new edition of Betjeman's verse editor Kevin Gardner promises new treasures for 'Betj's' admirers the world over. Betjeman wrote many of these poems in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he was still developing his unique poetic voice. They reveal a young poet experimenting with both Modernism and post-Romanticism, yet influenced by Shelley and Pope among others. Some of these poems are profoundly psychological, personal and deeply affecting to read today. Several have the delicate and eccentric touch of much of his early poetry and shed new light on his growth as a young poet, while many others reflect the sustained maturity of his later verse. Almost all are typically amusing and highly witty in the style typical of Betjeman; some verge on the bawdy and even, in one instance, point towards homosexuality. These charming and surprising new discoveries, found in archives as far apart as Austin, Texas, and Christ Church, Oxford, will delight poetry lovers and introduce a whole new generation to Betjeman's unforgettable work.
Trains and Buttered Toast
Author: John BetjemanPublisher: John Murray Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378
Book Description
Eccentric, sentimental and homespun, John Betjeman's passions were mostly self-taught. He saw his country being devastated by war and progress and he waged a private war to save it. His only weapons were words--the poetry for which he is best known and, even more influential, the radio talks that first made him a phenomenon. From fervent pleas for provincial preservation to humoresques on eccentric vicars and his own personal demons, Betjeman's talks combined wit, nostalgia and criticism in a way that touched the soul of his listeners from the 1930s to the 1950s. Now, collected in book form for the first time, his broadcasts represent one of the most compelling archives of 20th-century broadcasting.
The Best Loved Poems of John Betjeman
Author: John BetjemanPublisher: John Murray Pubs Limited
ISBN: 9780719565458
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 99
Book Description
John Betjeman was without question the most popular poet of the twentieth century and his poems have been bought and read by millions. He opened eyes to what before him had seemed ordinary but is now unforgettable. There is no other poet remotely like him and this collection of favourites is a perfect reminder of his extraordinary originality and appeal. It is perfect too for those who still have in store the pleasure of discovery.
Ghastly Good Taste
Author: John BetjemanPublisher: London : Blond
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 152
Book Description
Written when Betjeman was 26 and criticised by the author himself in this edition for showing "sententiousness, arrogance and sweeping generalisation." Includes a potted autobiography of his early years showing how he came to write such a book.
The Best of Betjeman
Author: John BetjemanPublisher: John Murray Publishers
ISBN: 9780719568329
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
John Betjeman, appointed Poet Laureate in 1972, is celebrated as the best loved poet of the twentieth century. His subtle blend of wit and melancholia, affection and criticism continues to attract an ever-expanding readership. From beneath his sparkling wit and deceptively simple nostalgia, Betjeman emerges as the authority on a broad range of subjects from conservation and church architecture to tradition and Englishness. In this selection of his greatest poetry and prose, cherished classics such as Slough, Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden and A Subaltern’s Love-song sit beside rare gems like Metro-land, Betjeman’s critically acclaimed film script.
Being Betjeman
Author: Jonathan SmithPublisher:
ISBN: 9781912916290
Category : Betjeman, John
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
When did you last hear of a poetry book selling in the millions? Well, since 1958 when John Betjeman's Collected Poems was first published, sales have exceeded 2.5 million and are still going strong. When he died in 1984, still as Poet Laureate, he was by far the UK's favourite poet (as Philip Larkin acknowledged). Thanks to his work as a broadcaster and architectural campaigner he was also a celebrity. However his life was full of insecurities, frustrations and busted relationships, and in terms of his work, his comments that 'he was not taken seriously by the TLS' said it all. Jonathan Smith, author of many successful novels, but also a playwright and educationalist, wrote two radio plays dramatising Betjeman's life which were first broadcast on the BBC in 2017 and which have now been combined into a single narrative, part biography, part fiction but providing an extraordinary - and above all, highly entertaining - journey into the mind and the life of John Betjeman. The book follows the poet from his time at Oxford where he wandered around clutching a teddybear, then having been kicked out, to the well trodden route of Prep School master (he was taken on as a cricket coach, knowing absolutely nothing about the game). Then onto his unfortunate marriage to Penelope Chetwode an English travel writer, and the only daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, who sadly was more interested in horses than humans. The book then centres on his lengthy affair with Lady Elizabeth Cavendish and his problems with son Paul, who emigrated to the USA and never really forgave Betjeman for his shortcomings as a parent. Beautifully written, we expect this book to be widely noticed in reviews.
Collected Poems of John Updike, 1953-1993
Author: John UpdikePublisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307961974
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 580
Book Description
“The idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise—the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control. In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux.” Thus John Updike writes in introducing his Collected Poems. The earliest poems here date from 1953, when Updike was twenty-one, and the last were written after he turned sixty. Almost all of those published in his five previous collections are included, with some revisions. Arranged in chronological order, the poems constitute, as he says, “the thread backside of my life’s fading tapestry.” An ample set of notes at the back of the book discusses some of the hidden threads, and expatiates upon a number of fine points. Nature—tenderly intricate, ruthlessly impervious—is a constant and ambiguous presence in these poems, along with the social observation one would expect in a novelist. No occasion is too modest or too daily to excite metaphysical wonder, or to provoke a lyrical ingenuity of language. Yet even the wittiest of the poems are rooted to the ground of experience and fact. “Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes” attempt to explicate the physical world with a directness seldom attempted in poetry. Several longer poems—“Leaving Church Early,” “Midpoint”—use autobiography to proclaim the basic strangeness of existence.