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Poet
John Betjeman
B. 1906 D. 1984
John Betjeman (1906-1984) achieved huge success during his lifetime and continues to retain his ‘National Treasure’ status more than twenty years after his death. His gift for comic writing, his dazzling technical abilities and his combination of eccentricity and Englishness…
Poet
John Heath Stubbs
B. 1918 D. 2006
John Heath-Stubbs (1918 – 2006) recalled how the teacher at his tiny village school read her pupils Our Island Story, sparking in him the lifelong fascination with history that informed his poetic career. He completed his education at Worcester College…
Poem
I see the winding water make A short and then a shorter lake As here stand I, And house-boat high, Survey the Upper Thames. By sun the mud is amber-dyed In ripples slow and fat and wide, That flap against the…
Poem
A Subaltern’s Love Song - John Betjeman
Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament – you against me! Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace…
Poem
Youth and Age on Beaulieu River - John Betjeman
Early sun on Beaulieu water Lights the undersides of oaks, Clumps of leaves it floods and blanches, All transparent glow the branches Which the double sunlight soaks; To her craft on Beaulieu water Clemency the General’s daughter Pulls across with…
Keystone
Poet
Luke Wright
B. 1982
Luke Wright (b. 1982) was spurred into poetry when he first saw John Cooper Clarke perform at the Colchester Arts Centre in 1998, which, he said, ‘changed everything’. Since then Wright has become one of the most celebrated live poets…
Keystone
Poem
Excerpts from ‘How to wash a heart’ - Bhanu Kapil
Like this? It’s inky-early outside and I’m wearing my knitted scarf, like John Betjeman, poet of the British past. I like to go outside straight away and stand in the brisk air. Yesterday, you vanished into those snowflakes like…
Poet
Pam Ayres
B. 1947
Pam Ayres is celebrated in the UK (and far beyond) as a favourite radio, TV and stage entertainer; it is impossible to read her comic poems without hearing her voice in your head. She says that she wrote them to…
Poet
R. S. Thomas
B. 1913 D. 2000
R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) teemed with contradictions: a passionate advocate of Welsh nationalism he wrote in English and sent his son to boarding school in England; an undemonstrative man he composed the most tender elegies for his wife; a man…
Poet
Wendy Cope
B. 1945
Wendy Cope (b. 1945) is a poet whose witty lyrics and pitch-perfect parodies have gained her a readership far beyond most of her peers. Born in Erith, Kent, she read History at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She then taught in…