[Although] he writes from within the essentially middle-class tradition of English liberal humanism, Betjeman has been a consistently subversive force in modern English poetry, and it is clear from his latest poems that his criticism of English society has taken on an angrier tone. A second element in his writing is the increasingly powerful note of spiritual anguish, a deepening of the religious doubt and despair which was evident in an earlier poem, 'Tregardock', in his volume, High and Low (1966)…. In his later poems it is the urgency of Betjeman's social anger and spiritual anguish which seem to me to characterise his response to life as it really is, but the depth of his personal commitment does not hinder the poetry from exploring some of the fundamental issues of twentieth-century life and expanding into an accurate general statement of the human condition.

In an important sense, his subversive...