ABSTRACT
Larkin, Causley and Thomas all had a champion in John Betjeman (1906-84): a poet who essentially treated modernism as though it had not happened, famous for writing about the world as he experienced it in realist terms, and quite the most popular English poet of his generation. Betjeman composed a gushing ‘Introduction’ to Thomas’s Song at the Year’s Turning, which ended: ‘The “name” which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider public will be forgotten long before that of R. S. Thomas’,1 and elsewhere he referred to Causley and Larkin as ‘my two top’ contemporary poets.2 After accepting the Laureateship in 1972, Betjeman told Larkin: ‘You were the one I wanted for the job – not that I was consulted – and failing you Charles Causley’.3
