John Betjeman, like suet pudding and the royal family, is one of those British phenomena whose charms have never really been appreciated on this side of the Atlantic. He is by far the most popular and beloved English poet of the postwar era — his “Collected Poems” have sold more than two and a half million copies — yet his name is virtually unknown here. In part this is because Betjeman managed to combine roles that simply do not go together in America: poet, broadcaster, preservationist, religious spokesman, and society figure. By the time he died, in 1984, he had become a national institution, in a way that no American poet since Robert Frost has come close to equaling. As A.N. Wilson writes, in his unabashedly admiring new biography, “Betjeman: A Life” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 375 pages, $27), “at some visceral level he spoke for England. He did so more than any politician of his time, and more than any of the religious leaders either.”

For that very reason, however, the particular resonance of Betjeman’s voice can be hard to pick up with our American equipment. The new “Collected Poems” (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 498 pages, $25), issued in tandem with Mr. Wilson’s biography, is the latest attempt to transplant Betjeman’s work into foreign soil, but it is doubtful whether it will succeed any better than previous efforts. For while Betjeman is a truly masterful poet, in the sense that he can always elicit the effect he desires from the English language, he is also a deeply provincial one. In fact, reading Betjeman, and reading about him, offer a useful reminder that provincialism can be a strength as well as a limitation.