Posts Tagged ‘rejection’

Britain’s official royal poet was in a bit of a snit. Sir John Betjeman had been asked to pen a verse for Queen Elizabeth’s 1977 Silver Jubilee. And the usually good-humored 70-year-old Poet Laureate was not pleased with the response. Among other criticism, Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn had called Betjeman’s patriotic work “banal.”

After the poet left in a huff, his agent explained to reporters, “He is very upset that it is being treated as a poem when in fact it was never intended to be. It is a hymn.”

Whatever literary critics and politicians thought, when Betjeman’s “hymn”—sung to a composition by Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music—premiered later at London’s Royal Albert Hall, it was greeted by long and thunderous applause. Clearly the public overruled the critics.

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