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last rallying point had gone: G.S. Fraser, whose flat had for years
been the meeting place of young writers, had packed up and gone to
teach at the University of Leicester. The fog reigned undisturbed.
But not for long. On December 1st the calm was disastrously
shattered. With the young men off the field, the Old Guard moved
back in force. The occasion was the publication of
The Collected Poems
of John Betjeman,
with a preface, for no apparent reason, by Lord
Birkenhead. Now, Mr. Betjeman is a skillful, harmless, minor writer
of light verse, who is most successful when hymning
les petits plaisirs
des riches;
he writes little panegyrics on bullying tennis girls, the nos–
talgia of boarding schools and the hidden charms of Victorian archi–
tectural monstrosities. His subjects, in short, are the rather delicious trials
and tribulations of being upper middle class. He also writes bad, religiose
poems about death. He is a kind of Evelyn Waugh of light verse, though
with none of Waugh's early savagery. At best, his work is clever,
amusing and rings a small bell in everyone who has been through the
Public School mill. At worst, it is embarrassing much in the manner
of the U-non-U controversy (to which he contributed). But no one,
apart from a few mildly eccentric English dons at Oxford, had ever taken
it particularly seriously; certainly not Mr. Betjeman who, by all ac–
counts, is a gentle, modest man. He was probably as surprised as any–
one else to find himself set up overnight as a major popular poet,
a kind of Robert Frost in Savile Row clothing. But there he was.
Of all the influential papers, only
The New Statesman
had a really
critical word to say of him. For the rest, he was a symbol of everything
that was fine and lasting in English poetry. In two and a half months
33,400 copies of his book have been sold. This is almost certainly a good
many more than the
Collected Poems
of T .S. Eliot sold in as many
years. Moreover, Mr. Betjeman's sales show no sign of dropping. He
is the first best-selling poet his publisher has had since Byron.
Nobody, of course, grudges Mr. Betjeman his success. He has,
at least, stuck to his reactionary guns through all the great revolutions
of modern poetry. His success is belated, inevitable anld deserved. What
is depressing about it is simply its scale, and its literary and political
implications. In terms of literature, the fact that Mr. Betjeman's book
has become a best-seIler-and the first poetry best-seller since heaven
only knows when-means quite simply, I think, that the revolution
called "modern poetry," on which all our critical standards are founded,
never took place for a huge proportion of the English poetry-reiding
public. They are still living in some hazy pre-Prufrock Never-Never
