Collected Poems

By John Betjeman and Andrew Motion

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's Collected Poems first 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 the Collected Poems, incorporates all the poems that Betjeman published after the original Collected Poems and includes a new foreword by Britain's poet laureate, Andrew Motion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466878280

John Betjeman

John Betjeman was born in 1906 and educated at Marlborough and Magdalen College, Oxford. He gave his first Radio talk in 1932; future appearances made him into a national celebrity. He was knighted in 1969 and appointed poet laureate in 1972. He died in 1984.

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