Not as good as KA!!! KA was primarily a novelist, and a very good one, much better than Martin, but his poems are minor things, though I like them. Betjeman is one of the three best English poets of the last century, along with Larkin and Auden in my opinion. His voice is distinctive and he has that wonderful English melancholy we find in Tennyson and Arnold and in lesser voices too, like de la Mare. The Scots, where I grew up, don't do melancholy, and neither do Americans unless I've missed something.
Some of those closing stanzas. Just read them and you'll see what I mean. Larkin can do that, but Amis can't, and doesn't want to.
David, any chance of getting to see that article of yours without all that plaver of a 7 days free trial. I am always suspicious of free trials, but I'd like to read the article.
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