ENRIGHT, D(ennis) J(oseph)

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Nationality: British. Born: Leamington, Warwickshire, 11 March 1920. Education: Leamington College; Downing College, Cambridge, B.A. (honors) in English 1944, M.A. 1946; University of Alexandria, Egypt, D.Litt. 1949. Family: Married Madeleine Harders in 1949; one daughter. Career: Lecturer in English, University of Alexandria, 1947–50; organizing tutor, Extra-Mural Department, Birmingham University, 1950–53; visiting professor, Konan University, Kobe, Japan, 1953–56; Gastdozent, Free University, West Berlin, 1956–57; British Council Professor of English, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 1957–59; professor of English, University of Singapore, 1960–70; temporary lecturer in English, University of Leeds, Yorkshire, 1970–71; honorary professor of English, University of Warwick, Coventry, 1975–80. Since 1982 freelance writer. Coeditor, Encounter magazine, London, 1970–72; editorial adviser, 1971–73 and member of the board of directors, 1973–82, Chatto and Windus publishers, London. Awards: Cholmondeley Award, 1974; Society of Authors traveling scholarship, 1981; Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 1981; companion of literature, 1999. H.D.L.: University of Warwick, 1982; H.D. Univ.: University of Surrey, Guildford, 1985. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1961. OBE (Officer, Order of the British Empire), 1991. Agent: Watson Little Ltd., Capo di Monte, Windmill Hill, London NW3 6RJ. Address: 35-A Viewfield Road, London SW18 5JD, England.

Publications

Poetry

Season Ticket. Alexandria, Editions du Scarabée, 1948.

The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems. London, Routledge, 1953.

The Year of the Monkey. Kobe, privately printed, 1956.

Bread Rather Than Blossoms. London, Secker and Warburg, 1956.

Some Men Are Brothers. London, Chatto and Windus, 1960.

Addictions. London, Chatto and Windus, 1962.

The Old Adam. London, Chatto and Windus, 1965.

Unlawful Assembly. London, Chatto and Windus, and Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1968.

Selected Poems. London, Chatto and Windus, 1969.

The Typewriter Revolution and Other Poems. New York, Library Press, 1971.

In the Basilica of the Annunciation. London, Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971.

Daughters of Earth. London, Chatto and Windus, 1972.

Foreign Devils. London, Covent Garden Press, 1972.

The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood. London, Chatto and Windus, 1973; Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1974.

Rhyme Times Rhyme (for children). London, Chatto and Windus. 1974.

Sad Ires and Others. London, Chatto and Windus, 1975.

Penguin Modern Poets 26, with Dannie Abse and Michael Longley. London, Penguin, 1975.

Paradise Illustrated. London, Chatto and Windus, 1978.

A Faust Book. London, Oxford University Press, 1979.

Walking in the Harz Mountains, Faust Senses the Presence of God. Richmond, Surrey, Keepsake Press, 1979.

Collected Poems. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Instant Chronicles. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Collected Poems 1987. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Selected Poems 1990. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press. 1990.

Under the Circumstances. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Old Men and Comets. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Collected Poems 1948–1998. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Novels

Academic Year. London, Secker and Warburg, 1955.

Heaven Knows Where. London, Secker and Warburg, 1957.

Insufficient Poppy. London, Chatto and Windus, 1960.

Figures of Speech. London, Heinemann, 1965.

Other

A Commentary on Goethe's "Faust." New York, New Directions, 1949.

The World of Dew. Aspects of Living Japan. London, Secker and Warburg, 1955; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. Dufour, 1959.

Literature for Man's Sake: Critical Essays. Tokyo, Kenkyusha, 1955.

The Apothecary's Shop. London, Secker and Warburg, 1957; Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1959.

Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism (address). Singapore, Craftsman Press, 1960.

Conspirators and Poets. London, Chatto and Windus, and Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, Dufour, 1966.

Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor. London, Chatto and Windus, 1969.

Shakespeare and the Students. London, Chatto and Windus, 1970; New York, Schocken, 1971.

Man Is an Onion: Essays and Reviews. London, Chatto and Windus, 1972; LaSalle, Illinois, Library Press, 1973.

A Kidnapped Child of Heaven: The Poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough (lecture). Nottingham, University of Nottingham, 1972.

The Joke Shop (for children). London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, McKay, 1976.

Wild Ghost Chase (for children). London, Chatto and Windus, 1978.

Beyond Land's End (for children). London, Chatto and Windus, 1979.

A Mania for Sentences. London, Chatto and Windus, 1983; Boston, Godine, 1985.

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Fields of Vision: Essays on Literature, Language, and Television. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Play Resumed: A Journal. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Editor, Poets of the 1950's: An Anthology of New English Verse. Tokyo, Kenkyusha, 1955.

Editor, with Takamichi Ninomiya, The Poetry of Living Japan. London, Murray, and New York, Grove Press, 1957.

Editor, with Ernst de Chickera, English Critical Texts: 16th Century to 20th Century. London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1962.

Editor, A Choice of Milton's Verse. London, Faber, 1975.

Editor, Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson. London, Penguin, 1976.

Editor, The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945–1980. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Editor, The Oxford Book of Death. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Editor, Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Editor, The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets. London, Faber, 1989.

Editor, with David Rawlinson, The Oxford Book of Friendship. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.

Editor, The Oxford Book of the Supernatural. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1994.

Translator, with Madeleine Enright, Nature Alive, by Colette Portal. London, Chatto and Windus, 1980.

Translator/Reviser, with Madeleine Enright, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Random House, 1992.

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Critical Studies: D.J. Enright: Poet of Humanism by William Walsh, London, Cambridge University Press, 1974; "No Easy Answer: The Poetry of D.J. Enright" by Shirley Chew, in New Lugano Review (Lugano, Switzerland), vol. 3, no. 1–2, 1977; Anthony John Harding, in Poets of Great Britain and Ireland 1945–1960, edited by Vincent B. Sherry, Jr., Detroit, Gale, 1984; Life by Other Means: Essays on D.J. Enright edited by Jacqueline Simms, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990.

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The chief stimulus for the highly individual talent of D.J. Enright has been the landscape and people of the countries, mainly in the Far East, where he has spent most of his working life. Some characteristic attitudes already apparent in early poems about his native Black Country—in, for example, his pointing to the incongruity between the idyllic name and dreary reality of Swan Village—have persisted in later work like the disenchanted cameos of commuter London in Sad Ires or of the contemporary English scene satirized in Paradise Illustrated.

But it is through Enright's pictures of life abroad that his sense of ironic contrast is most memorably communicated, as in "The Beach at Abousir" between vacationers and those "pointed shapes, like trees in winter— / Aged men and ancient children" patiently waiting their chance to pilfer from the prosperous. In Japan the cherry "comes to its immaculate birth" amid poverty, hunger, and disease. A beautiful peasant girl is found to be a perfect subject by filmmakers "except for the dropsy / Which comes from unpolished rice" (the grim wordplay of the title, "A Polished Performance," is typical). Ragged subway sleepers, tensely "hectic rice-winners" commuting on the subway, and the ragman who "picks his comfort" in the gentle beauty of the Kyoto autumn make their silent but uncompromising comment on a society of extremes. In "A Pleasant Walk," contrasting the rows of banks lining "a noble promenade … paved in gold from every nation" with "the brutal village sunk in slush," Enright bitterly observes that "high commerce civilizes, there's no doubt of that." The banker of "Happy New Year," bemoaning the falling yen as he shows off his opulent house and art treasures, is relentlessly juxtaposed with the empty-pocketed "masters of their fourpenny kites / That soar in the open market of the sky"; the "moderate ambitions" of princes and generals for an air-conditioned palace, a smarter general headquarters, are shown against the refugees of "Brush-Fire" in flight from their burning shacks, pushing bicycles piled with small bundles. The controlled anger of "The Monuments of Hiroshima" is matched by the deadly fairy-tale idiom employed to recount a bombing error in "The Pied Piper of Akashi."

To Enright's acute, compassionate eye the great enemy is indifference to suffering, whether in the anonymous multitude or in the individual tragedy like that of the thirteen-year-old suicide who found rat poison cheaper than aspirin. In his dry, amused relish of the ludicrous he can often be very funny, but it is a humor, as in the caustic comment of "Public Address System" on the grotesqueries of excessive official politeness, from which the biting edge is seldom absent. "Simply, he was human, did no harm, and suffered for it" is his epitaph for the poor and oppressed; his sense of the common sadness of the human condition is most poignantly crystallized in the diffident, fragile nocturnal melody, at once elegiac and celebrating survival, of "The Noodle-Vendor's Flute."

The shock of large-scale misery and squalor to a caring Western sensibility is frequently registered through the accent of deliberate, almost casual understatement that allows the recorded fact to speak for itself, and this powerful restraint serves to intensify by contrast the impassioned force of the writer's pity and indignation. In common with his fellows of the so-called Movement, Enright has resolutely refused to sentimentalize the apparently picturesque, rejecting "epochs of parakeets, of peacocks, and paradisaic birds" for unembellished "images that merely were." This is reflected in his astringent advice in "Changing the Subject" and the wry self-mockery of an acknowledged poetic temptation in "Displaced Person Looks at a Cage-Bird," while both "Nature Poetry" and the enchanting "Blue Umbrellas" survey our distortions of reality by "the dishonesty of names."

Slyly quizzical, irreverent, socially inconvenient in his impatience of humbug, Enright directs the same remorseless wit toward his own shortcomings, as in "The Fairies," "The Ageing Poet," and "A Commuter's Tale," the barbs part of his scrutiny of the human sham, from minister of state to theorizing anarchist or romanticizing poet. A skeptical inner voice prompts him to question whether his own persistent choice of exotic backgrounds might not represent an escapist "rest from meaning." The answer is provided by his characteristic affirmation that "nothing is exotic, if you understand, / If you stick your neck out for an hour or two." The special tone of this civilized, ironic, unostentatious voice is invoked in "Elegy in a Country Suburb":

   Wholly truthful, intimate
   And utterly unsparing,
   A man communing with himself.

—Margaret Willy