Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle. Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle,...
Biography
Name:
D(ennis) J(oseph) Enright
Variant Name:
D. J(oseph) Enright, Dennis Joseph Enright, D. J. Enright
Among the 1950s poets who rejected the modernist tradition, D.J. Enright deserves a secure place. Though sometimes associated with The Movement and sharing The Movement's dislike of the esoteric and their cultivation of vernacular diction and...
If the name and work of D. J. Enright, who died on New Year's Eve, 2002 at the age of eighty-two, are little known in the United States, that is not surprising; the same is true in his native England. The circumstances of his...
D.J. ENRIGHT spent a great deal of his working life teaching English literature in foreign universities: Egypt, Japan, Germany, Thailand, Singapore. In these places he was sometimes taken to be Danny Kaye, sometimes Harpo Marx - confusions which he occasionally allowed to go unresolved....
[D. J. Enright's] four novels, which appeared between 1955 and 1965, while they have had considerable critical acclaim, have received less than their due attention from the reading public. All these novels are set abroad, in Alexandria, the imaginary island of Velo, or Bangkok or Japan. No doubt this fits in with the simple biographical fact that Enright has spent a considerable part of his career abroad as a Professor of English Literature in various Far Eastern universities. He undoubtedly knows wh...
[Collected Poems] is a severely pruned collection of poems written by Enright between 1953 and now. What picture of the poet emerges from them? Academic, humanist, traveller. (p. 85) But most of all a single scene comes to mind. The poet is at his desk in some far-flung corner of south-east Asia. It is night, so the desk lamp is switched on. The poet continues to write, as insects gather under the lamp. Then the lizards come and eat the insects. The insects think the poet is punishing them by feeding them t...
