Collected Poems by John Betjeman

I ended up rewriting this review from scratch…which was hardly a loss, as it meant I had a much better chance to go back and revisit some of my favourites out of this collection.

Collected Poems by John Betjeman

John Betjeman (1906-1984) is one of those poets whose works are either loved or loathed. I’m fond of many of his poems, but I can see how other people would find them twee or overly sentimental — they tend to call upon a romanticised version of an England of the past, redolent of Ovaltine at bedtime and bicycles on country lanes and salt-stained lodging houses along the seaside. But there’s a faded sort of sadness to many of his poems, a sense that even this romantic past is seldom as lovely as we would like it be.

I believe that Betjeman himself spoke of his Collected Poems as being more ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’, and it is not difficult to see why. He has an ear for rhythm and rhyme that at times is more suited to a music hall than a formal poetry recitation, often bordering on outright doggerel. His personal tastes come through quite clearly, as in this excerpt from ‘May-Day Song for North Oxford’ which highlights his longstanding dislike of former tutor C.S. Lewis:

Oh! well-bound Wells and Bridges! Oh! earnest ethical search!
For the wide high-table λογος of St. C.S. Lewis’s Church!
This diamond-eyed Spring morning my soul soars up the slope
Of a right good rough-cast buttress on the housewall of my hope.

Betjeman’s distaste for redevelopment and modern planning show up in many poems in this collection, such as his semi-notorious call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on Slough and his sharp parodies of young executives and bureaucrats. Yet mixed in with the doses of vitriol are some of his brighter poems, such as the bouncing joy of ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’, and more sombre pieces like ‘Devonshire Street W.1′. The Collected Poems show off the range of Betjeman’s work, the silly and the sad together, and provide a fine single volume of most of the best-known poems of this popular Poet Laureate.

On my recent research trip, I stopped by the newly renovated St Pancras Station to take a photograph of the Betjeman statue that has a place of honour inside the station hall. Betjeman fought to preserve the station from being torn down in the mid-1960s, and the statue attempts to capture him, with a heavy bag in hand and his coat caught in the breeze from a passing train, as he stops to look up at the great vaulted ceiling of the station. I think my photograph came out rather nicely.

Collected Poems by Siegfried Sassoon

Still going back through reviews I’ve written previously, this time with another book of collected poems.

Collected Poems by Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon’s name, in many respects, is synonymous with the concept of ‘war poetry’. Sassoon, along with Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves and several other fellow poets, wrote about the experiences of soldiers in what would become known as the First World War (or it would be, by the time we realised that we might as well start numbering our massively devastating all-encompassing military conflicts). The Collected Poems hasn’t really changed since Faber and Faber brought out their first edition of it about forty years ago, but even after so long it is good to have this collection of the best examples of Sassoon’s lyrical, plain-spoken poetry.

It’s interesting to read Sassoon’s poetry and see how the writing style and source material changes and develops over the years, because the change seems to me to be a fairly noticeable one. His earliest pre-war poems are heavily sunk in a pastoral kind of Romanticism, as in paens to Nature like ‘The Old Hunstman‘, and even his early war poems are not truly free of the Romantic influence. Most, though not all, of his later poems lost much of this pastoral innocence. The Collected Poems also contains quite a few of Sassoon’s sharply satirical writings on subjects as diverse as the diary of a deceased ambassador (’The visionless officialized fatuity/That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity‘) and his own fumbling attempts to reconcile his socialist leanings to his well-off background:

‘What do you know?’ exclaim my fellow-diners
(Peeling their plovers’ eggs or lifting glasses
Of mellowed Château Rentier from the table),
‘What do you know about the working classes?’

Yet it is for his war poetry and the immediate post-war poetry that Sassoon is most likely to be remembered. The Collected Poems pull together the works of a poet whose works always seem to have some resonance, no matter what the current political situation happens to be.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Collected Poems 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems 1980-2000 by R.S. Thomas

A good friend of mine initially piqued my interest in the poetry of R.S. Thomas, but I never seemed to be able to find a copy of his works when I was looking for one. Yet in one of those happy coincidences that seem to happen most often when I’m book shopping, I was poking through the poetry shelves in Daunt Books when a minor book landslide nearly sent several volumes toppling onto my head. After a moment’s flailing, I stemmed the book-fall…and the book I ended up using to hold back the deluge was the collected poems of R.S. Thomas. I couldn’t just leave it on the shelf after all that, could I?

Collected Poems 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems 1980-2000 by R.S. Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas was a Welsh clergyman who spent his working life in a number of rural parishes, and much of his poetry centres on religion, rural Wales, and the exploration of Welsh national and cultural identity. He was a fervent proponent of the Welsh language and Welsh culture, not least because he grew up speaking English and regretted the fact that he only came to learn Welsh as an adult. His outspoken views occasionally sparked controversy, most notably when he publically praised the arsonists who destroyed English holiday-homes in Wales in the 1980s. And there is a good deal of anger and resentment in his poetry, as well as frustration and sadness, as shown for example in the opening lines of ‘The Old Language’:

England, what have you done to make the speech
My fathers used a stranger to my lips,
An offence to the ear, a shackle on the tongue
That would fit new thoughts to an abiding tune?

It borders on cliche to describe his writing style as ‘flinty’ or ‘bitter’, but it’s a very apt description. The crisply lyrical quality of his poetry makes it wonderful to recite aloud, and its memorable sound and images even inspired a bit of gentle parody by another excellent Welsh poet, Harri Webb. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I think parody runs a close second at times.

The first Collected Poems isn’t the complete corpus of Thomas’s work. His Collected Later Poems covers his last five collections of poetry, and also includes several poems and fragments that he had written but not published before his death in 2000. There are a few points that bear mentioning with regard to this second collection. ‘The Echoes Return Slow’, the first section of the book, is an autobiography done in short snatches of stream-of-consciousness prose followed by brief poems. These later poems seem to have a more religious turn than those from his earlier collection. Most of the poems have a strongly Christian theme, musings on man’s relationship with God and how to make sense of religion and faith in a world where both are often tested. Compared to the first collection, there are certainly fewer rants (so to speak) about the decline of Wales and Welsh culture and language. And though I enjoy Thomas’s writing style, with its alternating crisp tones and slow, languid musings, I have to say that I prefer the poems of the first collection. Thomas’s poetic voice comes through more strongly, I think, in his writings about the Welsh people. But both volumes are collections of moving and thought-provoking poems by a very remarkable poet, and I’m glad I have a nice compact collection of his work.