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Baylor BU English Faculty Publications Harvest Bells
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    • Then Winter
    • Building Jerusalem
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    • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
    • Entertaining Judgment
    • Seamus Heaney's Regions
    • Elegy on Kinderklavier
    • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
    • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
    • The Tulip-Flame
    • The Glyph and the Gramophone
    • The Prodigal
    • Beyond the Pulpit
    • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
    • Sylvia Plath's Fiction

Harvest Bells

New and Uncollected Poems by John Betjeman

Kevin J. Gardner, Professor of English

John Betjeman (1906-1984), the former poet laureate, remains one of Britain's foremost and much-loved writers whose poetry has passed into the collective memory as an affectionate and witty monument to twentieth century British life. In this new edition of collected unpublished verse, Gardner promises more treasures for Betjeman enthusiasts the world over. Harvest Bells contains poems never before published as well as uncollected poems previously printed only in newspapers, magazines, broadsides and obscure books.

Betjeman wrote many of these poems in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he was still developing his unique poetic voice. They reveal a young poet experimenting with both Modernism and post-Romanticism. Some of these are profoundly psychological and personal, and they are deeply affecting to read today. Here can be seen the clear and surprising influence of, among other poets, Percy Shelley and Robert Browning. In these poems we can also witness the development of Betjeman's characteristic interests and themes: suburbia, desire, faith, and death. Some have the delicate and eccentric touch of much of his early poetry and shed new light on his growth as a young poet, while many others reflect the sustained maturity of his later verse. Most are typically amusing and highly witty in the manner of a large amount of Betjeman's work; some are darker in tone. These charming new discoveries, found as far apart as Waco, Texas and Christ Church College, Oxford will delight lifelong readers as well as introducing a whole new generation to Betjeman's unforgettable work.

Bloomsbury Press, 2019

ISBN 9781472966384


"Kevin J Gardner has dug up 80 or so lost or neglected poems from the archives, which show the full range of Betjeman's oeuvre over half a century." —The Sunday Times

"A marvellous gathering of hitherto hidden Betjeman, varied and surprising." —Anthony Thwaite, poet and editor of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems

"The Betjeman music, but satire, fear and dissonance are its vivid companions." —Peter Scupham, poet

English

College of Arts & Sciences

Carroll Science 106

Department of English
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Waco, TX 76798-7404

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      • Literacy in a Long Blues Note
      • Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
      • A Fire to Light Our Tongues
      • Hollow Palaces
      • Haunted Property
      • American Literary Cultures
      • Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America
      • Modernism in the Green
      • A Long, Long Way
      • Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature
      • The Courage to See
      • The Evil Twins of American Television
      • Harvest Bells
      • Letters of a Long Name
      • Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion
      • Reforming Women
      • Thomas Hoccleve
      • Mark Twain Under Fire
      • Building Natures
      • Understanding Marilynne Robinson
      • Living with the Living Dead
      • The Life Group
      • Then Winter
      • Building Jerusalem
      • The Divine Face in Four Writers
      • Seamus Heaney: An Introduction
      • Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print
      • Housework and Gender in American Television
      • The Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes
      • Entertaining Judgment
      • Seamus Heaney's Regions
      • Elegy on Kinderklavier
      • Tracing Southern Storytelling in Black and White
      • Mapping Christian Rhetorics
      • The Tulip-Flame
      • The Glyph and the Gramophone
      • The Prodigal
      • Beyond the Pulpit
      • The Reconstruction of Mark Twain
      • Sylvia Plath's Fiction
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