John Betjeman was a truly outstanding poet – among the greatest of the 20th Century and likely the most popular English poet of his time. Yet it could still be argued he is underappreciated. The author of lovely poems about life, his homeland, and Christianity, he was a devout Anglican and devoted family man racked with guilt and self-doubt. I return to him whenever I feel the same, inspired by his belief – and the theme of much of his work – that Love Is Everything. This was not a sentimentalist, empty-headed call to minimize the evil of the world in a happy embrace of emotionalism, but rather a commitment to share our sufferings and troubles with those we love and with the Supreme Love, made known to us as Jesus Christ. Betjeman struggled all his life with melancholia, yet he clung contently to his family and his home, finding virtue as a social creature in the community and in the traditions of his birth. In his celebrations and laments, the consistent root was a search for God: a longing that continued until the full reunion of a death, the finality of a life well lived. In this he was the same as his rival Evelyn Waugh, who in private letter to the family once admitted to being “by nature a bully and a scold.” As He does for us, Christ saved these great literary figures from themselves and allowed them to become more fully human, capable of greater and greater love.
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