Major Minor Poet

John Betjeman, 52, is a gentle, witty, rumpled Englishman who has been called "the greatest bad poet now living." It would be in character if he agreed with that estimate, although he can be called "bad" only in the sense that his rhymes sometimes jingle like a song writer's and that his subjects are often deliberately homely. Literary bookmakers predict that Betjeman (rhymes with fetch-a-man) will be England's next poet laureate. By last week, his Collected Poems had caused a rush on British bookstores probably unmatched by any newly published work of poetry since Byron's Childe Harold burst forth in 1812. Betjeman's 279-page volume was selling at the rate of about 1,000 copies a day, a turnover few bestselling novelists achieve.

The cause of his success is not just his billing as "the poet the Princess reads" (Margaret does). It is simply that Britons of all classes think Betjeman one of the pleasantest men alive. He himself says that he cannot understand why people buy his verse ("I don't call it poetry"), and he describes himself as "a passionate observer of the second-rate." Actually, Betjeman observes a great deal more than the second-rate. He has a unique eye for the twilight of changing times, although he is one Englishman who looks neither back in anger nor forward in fear. He is perhaps the sharpest and yet gentlest landscape poet now writing in English, whether he lyrically describes a summer meadow or peers with sane, affectionate exasperation at

Dear old, bloody old England Of telegraph poles and tin.

Kindly Stygian. Betjeman's nostalgia is for the Victorian past; his heart is in its poor remnants, and he frankly calls himself "a case of arrested development." He was raised comfortably in London, great-grandson of a Dutch-descended Englishman who grew rich on inventions such as the tantalus, a contrivance to keep Victorian housemaids out of the port. Betjeman went to Oxford's Magdalen College, where he detested his tutor (Author C. S. Lewis), failed to get a degree because he forgot to take "divvers" (divinity).

Once an assistant editor of Architectural Review, Betjeman has a rare knowledge and love of English places that is even more famed in Britain than his poetry. To keep his island from becoming "a right little, tight little clinic," he is constantly embroiled in some passionate public campaign -to subdue TV aerials, to save ancient towing canals or musty little churches. He writes glowing guidebooks, and he has so cleaned up the despised name of Victorian Gothic architecture that some of his readers are able to look even on London's Stygian train terminals with a kindly eye.

As a lover not of antiquarianism but of genuine gaslit charm and hedge-hid privacy, Poet Betjeman despises planned progress: I have a Vision of the Future, chum,

The workers' flats in fields of soya beans

Tower up like silver pencils, score on score:

And Surging Millions hear the Challenge come

From microphones in communal canteens

"No Right! No Wrong! All's perfect, evermore."

Pressed by Pam. Betjeman stands for the local, the small, the decent; and his verse is filled with an engaging shorthand of brand names -Austin cars, Craven A cigarettes, Heinz's Ketchup, Post Toasties. In one poem he used the names of real people to ironic effect ("T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells and Edith Sitwell lie in Mell-stock Churchyard now"), but added the thoughtful note: "The names are put in not out of malice or satire but merely for their euphony."

Despite his coziness, he has a keen sense of the skull beneath the skin, has set down chilling visions of approaching death. Though his most typical tone is somewhere between mockery and sentimentality, he can be fiercely satirical. During the war, when he worked at the Ministry of Information, Betjeman wrote a sardonic prayer:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.

Spare their women for Thy Sake.

And if that is not too easy

We will pardon Thy Mistake,

But gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,

Don't let anyone bomb me.

In some of his funniest poems Betjeman is given to adolescent admiration of female tennis players ("Pam, I adore you, Pam, you great big mountainous sports girl"). He cries to be a sports girl's racket, pressed to her breast or flying in the sunlit air. But Betjeman is not chiefly a poet of humor. Born a Quaker, but now a deeply serious Anglican, he can write of religion with earnest simplicity or with a chuckle ("The old Great Western Railway makes me very sorry for my sins").

Grace Notes. Betjeman both likes and deplores the sad, cramped lives of city suburbs. His own life is cramped by book reviewing (London Daily Telegraph), a trade he detests, but he has managed some grace notes. His Berkshire country home is an old rectory in Wantage, birthplace of Alfred the Great. There his busy wife Penelope (daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode) hunts and fishes with Pam-like energy, keeps an eye on their son and daughter and runs a thriving tea shop called King Alfred's Kitchen. She puts up jam; he musingly produces about one poem every six weeks. "Almost any age seems civilized except that in which I live," he once wrote. "But it's wrong to think my verse ironical. I write of things I care about." In The Old Liberals he hauntingly evoked not only the archaic graces of two old people playing chamber music together in the dusk, but the waning echoes of an age:

For deep in the hearts of the man and

the woman playing The rose of a world that was not has

withered away. Where are the wains with garlanded

swathes a-swaying? Where are the swains to wend through

the lanes a-maying? Where are the blithe and jocund to ted

the hay? Where are the free folk of England?

Where are they?

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