He might have died more than 20 years ago, but the quintessentially English poet John Betjeman remains as popular as ever, writes Arminta Wallace.
By 6.30pm, there is a queue to get in: by 7pm, the Unitarian Church on St Stephen's Green is packed to the rafters. One man had driven from the Aran Islands, another from Bangor, Co Down, still others came from Cork. Who would have thought so many people from all corners of Ireland would be interested in a reading of work by that most English of poets, the late - and clearly much-lamented - John Betjeman? Not Poetry Ireland, which organised this week's celebration of the centenary of the poet's birth at the suggestion of his daughter, Candida Lycett-Green.
"We thought we might get, say, 10 or 15 people inquiring about it," says PI's director, Joe Woods. "But as it turned out, we've never had such interest in an event. For the past two weeks the phones never stopped. We've had some big readings all right, but never one quite like this."
While we wait, bathed in the warm evening light which streamed from St Stephen's Green through stained-glass windows, it becomes apparent that besides the devotees who are there strictly for the Betjeman, there are also some who have come to listen to Derek Mahon and Anthony Cronin read poetry - any poetry. In the seat behind me, the poet Brian Lynch is engaged in a lively discussion with a young man who admits to knowing nothing at all about the fare on offer.
"Accessible, popular sort of stuff, is it?" he asks. Yes, Lynch replied, and that was the point - critics have always leaned towards the view that because Betjeman was popular, he wasn't any good.
This popular view of Betjeman - largely cultivated by himself through his many TV and radio appearances - presents him as an amiable old duffer who liked to doddle around leafy lanes on his bicycle, visiting churches and eating cucumber sandwiches. His work celebrates the English countryside, pokes fun at the country set and bemoans the vulgarity of the lower orders. After his appointment as poet laureate in 1972, the Times hailed him: "By appointment: Teddy Bear to the Nation".
But there was more to him than that, as Cronin and Mahon effortlessly demonstrate with one wry poem after another. "He was a poet of human goodness, and human wickedness," says Cronin. "A poet of mortality, of loss, and of the immanence of death. And he was - above all - a poet of evocation."
"He didn't believe in progress and he didn't like horses," says Mahon. "He was a master of the slightly not-quite-right phrase or word, which gives many of the poems a faux-naiveté." At least one of the poems - Remorse, written at his estranged wife's deathbed - sends a shiver down the spine. Most, however, exhibit Betjeman's trademark boyish humour and love of the natural world: the English natural world, that is.
"Like his admirer Philip Larkin," Mahon says with a wry smile of which Betjeman would no doubt have approved, "Betjeman was never one for 'abroad'. Ireland was about as 'abroad' as he wanted to get."
Betjeman did, indeed, live and work in Ireland during the second World War, when he was press attache to the British High Commissioner. His daughter Candida was born in this country - hence her approach to Poetry Ireland with the idea of a commemorative reading for her father. One of Betjeman's greatest triumphs in this ministry of information job was, apparently, to arrange for the battle scenes in Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V to be shot here.
There has, however, been some debate as to the exact nature of his work in Dublin. A recent TV documentary suggested that Betjeman was, at one stage, targeted by the IRA. His prospective assassin recognised the name, however, and concluded that because he was a good poet, he couldn't possibly be a secret agent - so the hit was called off.
But the rumours persist. By way of introduction to the poem entitled Caprice, Cronin recalls being told by Patrick Kavanagh that Betjeman had treated him to lunch at the Shelbourne Hotel and offered him a job as a spy. "After giving it some thought," says Cronin, "he turned it down. I've always thought that was a mistake."
One can only speculate about the kind of outré intelligence which might have winged its way back to London had Kavanagh and Betjeman put their heads together over a pint and a cucumber sandwich.
But for all the whimsical comedy of his poetry, Betjeman had, as Joe Woods points out, a singularly sober take on Ireland and the Irish. "He has his own view of Ireland, and it's not a bad one," he says. "It's a very accurate picture of the Ireland of the 1940s. He really has en eye for detail, and he doesn't patronise. There's a poem called Midland Towns which captures that very well."
Betjeman's later years were marked by marital unhappiness and illness. Weakened by Parkinson's disease and a series of strokes, he died in 1984 at the age of 77 - but he never lost his sense of humour. Asked by an interviewer, in the hushed and plummy BBC tones of the time, whether he had any regrets, he replied briskly: "Yes. I regret that I didn't have more sex."
As the Poetry Ireland reading ends, the warmth of the applause which spreads around the room like butter over a slice of hot toast says it all. It is full of genuine affection, tempered by an indefinable sadness. Obviously reluctant to shatter the mood, people take forever to file out on to the street again. As Betjeman put it in his 1954 poem, Norfolk:
Time, bring back
The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.