Collected Poems

John Betjeman's Collected Poems first appeared in 1958; it made publishing history, and sold more than two and a half million copies to a steadily expanding readership. Betjeman, who succeeded Cecil Day Lewis as poet laureate and held the position until his death in 1984, was the best-loved British poet since Tennyson. He is known for his modern and accessible subject matter (more specifically depictions of English middle-class existence). This volume, the first American edition of the Collected Poems, includes the delightful autobiography in verse, Summoned by Bells, and a new introduction by Britain's poet laureate, Andrew Motion.

Introduction by Andrew Motion
 
MOUNT ZION (1932)
Death in Leamington
Hymn
The 'Varsity Students' Rag
The City
An Eighteenth-Century Calvinistic Hymn
For Nineteenth-Century Burials
Camberley
Croydon
Westgate-on-Sea
The Wykehamist
The Sandemanian Meeting-House in Highbury Quadrant
 
CONTINUAL DEW (1937)
The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel
Distant View of a Provincial Town
Slough
Clash went the Billiard Balls
Love in a Valley
An Impoverish Irish Peer
Our Padre
Exchange of Livings
Undenominational
City
A Hike on the Downs
Dorset
Calvinistic Evensong
Exeter
Death of King George V
The Heart of Thomas Hardy
Suicide on the Junction Road Station after Abstention from Evening Communion in North London
The Flight from Bootle
Public House Drunk
 
OLD LIGHTS FOR NEW CHANCELS (1940)
Cheltenham
A Shropshire Lad
Upper Lambourne
Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden
Holy Trinity, Sloane Street
On Seeing an Old Poet in the Café Royal
An Incident in the Early Life of Ebenezer Jones, Poet, 1828
Trebetherick
Oxford: Sudden Illness at the Bus-stop
Group Life: Letchworth
Bristol and Clifton
Sir John Piers
Myfanwy
Myfanwy at Oxford
Lake District
In Westminster Abbey
Senex
Olney Hymns
On a Portrait of a Deaf Man
Saint Cadoc
Blackfriars
 
NEW BATS IN OLD BELFRIES (1945)
Henley-on-Thames
Parliament Hill Fields
A Subaltern's Love-song
Bristol
On an Old-Fashioned Water-Colour of Oxford
A Lincolnshire Tale
St. Barnabas, Oxford
An Archaeological Picnic
May-Day Song for North Oxford
Before Invasion, 1940
Ireland with Emily
Margate, 1940
Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm
The Planster's Vision
In a Bath Teashop
Before the Anaesthetic, or A Real Fight
On Hearing the Full Peal of Ten Bells from Christ Church, Swindon, Wilts.
Youth and Age on Beaulieu River, Hants
East Anglian Bathe
Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall
The Irish Unionist's Farewell to Greta Hellstrom in 1922
In Memory of Basil, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava
South London Sketch, 1944
South London Sketch, 1844