The media were almost unanimous in another matter, too. Betjeman, they declared, would be read long after the 'high-brow' work of the modernists and their successors was forgotten. Modern poetry is generally obscure, inaccessible, excluding. Not only was Betjeman's life celebrated, his death lamented: he was wielded as a kind of weapon against the obfuscations which Eliot and Pound let loose on us. For Philip Larkin to use him this way is one thing: Larkin knows where he stands, and we recognize his polemic for what it is. Betjeman is genuinely part of his pantheon and he has appreciated him better than anyone. His own poetry appeals in terms similar to Betjeman's, though his technical acuity is greater and his poems have a deeper coherence than Betjeman's. When journalists use the late poet as a cudgel against modern poetry, one is inclined to protest-both for Betjeman's sake and for the sake of modern poetry.

While I hope Betjeman will continue to be read, it is likely that his readership will remain largely English (not British). The world that shaped him and his language hardly exists now: he is not a model on which younger poets can build with any confidence. Hardy, Kipling and Masefield are, paradoxically, more our contemporaries than he is, provide more serviceable models, reveal a far broader thematic range. And, pace the popular press, there exists a contemporary poetry quite as accessible as his, potentially as popular, in the work of Charles Causley, Kit Wright, Kingsley Amis and others. Traditional forms have not lost their vigour, even among the modernists and their heirs who, indeed, evince when it suits them extraordinary competence in rhyme and metre.

When Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, the media, enraged by ignorance, dubbed him 'an obscure East-European émigrée'. With Betjeman's death they try to settle scores with an Aunt Sally projected by an ignorance which they help to foster. It is sad that a well-loved poet's death should be used in this way-sad and dishonest. Betjeman himself would surely have deplored it. As a reader of other poets' work he was generous to a fault. His ghost will rest easier if his name is not used in a spirit of ungenerosity. Trojan horse he may be, but he comes in a modest spirit to enrich, not to impoverish, our city.