John Betjeman: 35 Favourite Poems

In a 1962 radio interview he told teenage questioners that he could not write about 'abstract things', preferring places and faces. Philip Larkin wrote of Betjeman's work, "how much more interesting & worth writing about (his) subjects are than most other modern poets, I mean, whether so-and-so achieves some metaphysical inner unity is not really so interesting as the overbuilding of rural Middlesex.