Collected Poems [Paperback]

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.
--from Slough

When the beloved English poet John Betjeman'sCollected Poemsfirst appeared in 1958, it made publishing history, and has now sold more than two million copies to a steadily expanding readership. Betjeman is almost unique among poets in that his work appeals equally strongly to those who love poetry and to those who rarely read it. This volume, the first American edition of theCollected Poems,incorporates all the poems that Betjeman published after the originalCollected Poemsand includes a new foreword by Britain's poet laureate, Andrew Motion.

Sir John Betjeman(1906-1984) was one of Britain's most recognized, beloved, and bestselling poets of the last century. He was knighted in 1969 and named Poet Laureate in 1972.

John Betjeman has succeeded better than most of his contemporaries in narrowing the gulf between poetry and the public. In his own province of feeling he has established a personal regency over all contemporary taste. The Times (London)

He is in the best sense a committed writer, whose poems spring from what he really feels about real life, and as a result he brings back to poetry a sense of dramatic urgency it had all but lost. Philip Larkin

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
Cityl��