Posts Tagged ‘review’

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.

Read the rest of this entry »