THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

hand. The ‘lengths and breadths of time’ have not only marred the sculptural image, but have also served to alter the
way in which all images are read and interpreted:
Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
The Audenesque confidence of the last line is deliberately qualified by the two preceding ‘almosts’. The provisionality
is essentially Larkin’s own.
John Betjeman (1906-84), whose poetry, almost uniquely amongst his contemporaries, Larkin professed to admire
heartily, dealt with English tradition, English religion, and English melancholy in a very different way. By the 1960s
Betjeman’s work was selling phenomenally well (his CollectedPoems, first published in 1958, sold 90,000 copies
within two years). His was a popular
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success based not simply on easily comprehensible, generously rhymed, and meticulously scanned verse, but also on a
calculated projection of himself as a celebrity. He adopted an enthusiastic, if somewhat bumbling, persona for himself
on television (though he consistently proved to be an intelligent and inventive performer, an adept critic of
architecture and a sensitive apologist for poetry). Middle-brow readers also welcomed his somewhat unproductive
tenure as Poet Laureate from 1972. Although Betjeman claimed in his gushy, blank-verse autobiography, Summoned
by Bells (1960), to have presented a volume of his schoolboy poems to ‘the American master, Mr Eliot’, he never later
revealed much of a response to Eliot’s metrical, intellectual, and lexical novelty. He did, however, share Eliot’s
Anglo-Catholicism and something of his feeling for national history and it was a fusion of religious and historical
sentiment with the associations of certain buildings and places which made for Betjeman’s most effective verse. His
collection Old Lights for New Chancels (1940) opens with eighteen specifically topographical poems and ends with a
‘Miscellaneous’ section which includes his wry study of an upper-class woman at prayer in wartime, ‘In Westminster
Abbey’. His later volumes, A Few Late Chrysanthemums (1954), High and Low (1966), and A Nip in the Air (1972),
suggest a poet further refining the techniques and forms he had evolved in the 1940s rather than one capable of
surprising his readers. But then, most of Betjeman’s readers, Larkin included, did not read him for surprises.
Stevie (Florence Margaret) Smith (1902-71) also won herself a wide, young, and sometimes unexpected, audience
in the 1960s. Smith, whose Novel on Yellow Paper (1936, reissued 1969) and two volumes of verse — A Good Time
was Had By All (1937) and Tender Only to One (1938) (both illustrated by her own straggly, naïve drawings) — had
received relatively little attention in their time, achieved a belated celebrity in 1957 with her new collection Not
Waving But Drowning (whose title poem proved her most popular). She cemented her reputation with a series of
distinctive, incantatory public readings, with her Selected Poems (1962), and with a new volume, The Frog Prince, in
1966. A Collected Poems appeared posthumously in 1975. She made a barbed, ostensibly simple poetry out of the
kind of subjects and expressions which other poets might have rejected as unconsidered trifles. She remained
sentimentally attached to the Church of England while denouncing its doctrines and its priests; she immersed herself
in mortality while whimsically greeting Death as a ‘gentle friend’ and dwelling, almost gaily, on the effects of
physical and mental decay. The drowning man, whose gesturing is misunderstood in ‘Not Waving but Drowning’,
moans that he was ‘much too far out all my life’ and Death in ‘Do Take Muriel Out’ is pressed to take the lonely
Muriel on a last outing (‘She will not complain | When you dance her over the blasted heath’). Smith wrote two