Licensed for Embracement: Insouciance and Exigency in John Betjeman’s Love Poems

Although John Betjeman is widely celebrated for blithe amatory poems such as ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ and ‘Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden’, literary critics have struggled to accommodate his love poetry, often implicitly categorising it as ‘light verse’ unworthy of close attention. This essay argues that the poems warrant such attention, as Betjeman craftily negotiates the pressures of frustrated desire and sexual guilt through deliberately making light of the emotional burdens that can often be discerned in the margins of his poetry.