John Wain, elected [to the Oxford Chair of Poetry] in 1973, offers nine lectures in "Professing Poetry," a charming introduction about his relation to Oxford, and an appendix of his recent poems that gives us examples to judge him by…. His style is straightforward: You know what he thinks all the time, and, like Johnson, he offers firm arguments, stating his positions on art, poetry and politics unequivocably. Of very few commentators may that be said; he belongs, in short, in Edmund Wilson's company. (p. 1)
In "On the Breaking of Forms," and "Poetry and Social Criticism," Wain shows us his own position: individualist, anti-state, common sense, the middle ground today where privacy survives, if precariously. These lectures are powerful attacks against propaganda, social utilitarianism and/or esoteric freedoms and dogmas. Wain is a sort of old-fashioned liberal, which is reactionary indeed today, here as in the English welfare state. He argues for our inherited language, which is what we all speak, unless we are speaking the masses Newspeak.
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