[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...

In a wry little poem, "The Fairies," D. J. Enright neatly sums up his response to the foreign countries in which he has worked: …          and the closet door swings eagerly open      And out falls a skeleton with a frightful crash. Enright's inaugural lecture at the University of Singapore, on which this poem presumably comments, aroused governmental hostility...

[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...

There is something to be said against collecting old book-reviews—but not when they are as good as D. J. Enright's. Flaubert and Heinrich Böll, 'Earthly Powers' and 'A Dictionary of Catch Phrases,' 'The Golden Lotus' and E. B. White: coming from most reviewers, the pieces assembled in 'A Mania for Sentences' would simply represent so many fares picked up at the rank. But in Enright's case they cohere, bound together by a con...

Professor Enright apologetically suggests that some of the short articles and reviews he has collected in [Conspirators and Poets] could 'scarcely be called "literary criticism."' By the standard he himself set in the best essays in his previous collection, The Apothecary's Shop, that may be true. But the apology can be read in more ways than one. When he writes in one of these pieces that the symbolism in John Updike's novels is all very neat and contr...

Enright is so witty, cogent and right-minded a commentator on literary practice, and believes so energetically in culture in a straightforward sense—'people listening to music and composing it, reading books and writing them'—that [in Conspirators and Poets] he offers a heartening view of what the endeavour is about. I would only say, too heartening. An inheritor of the Scrutiny tradition (one of the best pieces here is an unusually genuine appreciation of what Scrutiny gave us),...

Anybody at all interested in English poetry should read [D. J. Enright's Collected Poems]. It has in it the best autobiographical sequence written this century: 'The Terrible Shears.'… It also contains, in the short pieces, some of the wittiest and wryest comment on the modern world to be found in the verse of our time…. The intelligence, the irony and the wit are there from the first…. Puns appear throughout, good ('The hot iron of the railroad hisses in the...

The 'Movement' was doubtless a force in post-war poetry. But was it—as Robert Conquest, one of its leaders, claimed—unanimously empirical, ironical, and insular? Some of its members were incurably romantic, soft-hearted and keen on 'abroad'. Even D. J. Enright, who edited the Movement anthology Poets of the 1950s, was never absolutely faithful to the preferred neutral tone, and a reexamination which begins with him makes the Movement look rather a hotch-potch. The b...

The earliest of [Enright's] Collected Poems go back more than 30 years, to the end of the 1940s; but already in them you find that absolutely characteristic move away from a feeling of his own to a thought about somebody else—and then another thought…. Enright has lived abroad, teaching English literature, for much of his life, and he has written poems about Egyptians, Japanese, Germans, Thais, and the Malays and Chinese of Singapore. He has seen a lot of suffering and oppression; but h...

The four separate essays which comprise [Shakespeare and the Students] … will not be of great interest to serious critics of Shakespeare. Professor Enright presumably intends his leisurely discussions for students but does not indicate the level of sophistication of his audience, and his account of difficulties encountered by Singaporean students suggests that some of the misunderstanding he wishes to dispel has a cultural as well as a dramatic basis. Students at any level might well be confused by t...

Thinking of D. J. Enright's poems, one feels no inclination to talk in terms of 'promise,' for they are already fully achieved things in themselves. They face up to whatever judgment one makes of them with no petitions in their hands, no defensive pleas based on age or inexperience or a broken home. [Some Men are Brothers] is divided into four sections—Siam, Berlin, Japan and Displaced—whose titles might suggest that its author is more of a foiled circuitous wanderer than ...

[D. J. Enright] is out to make poetry from absolute, unambitious honesty. It is enough for him to be human and ordinary and to give exact rendering to the promptings of a humane consciousness. His role of professional and itinerant humanist is very sympathetic and one waits eagerly for the perfect Enright poem [in Some Men are Brothers], one in which the looseness of his verse justifies itself as flexibility, a freedom of approach allowing the subject to impose its own natural shape. (It would be the aesthe...

The words human and humane ring briskly through [the essays in Mr. Enright's The Apothecary's Shop], as, indeed, do their implications through his poems. Mr. Enright is a moralist—undoctrinaire but (if one can rid the word of false and mis-D(ennis) J(oseph) Enright 1920– Courtesy of Chatto & Windusleading accretions) committed. He is impatient with work which is not demonstrably about something, scornful of cr...

D. J. Enright, in Paradise Illustrated, has written 34 short poems on the myth of the Fall of Man, and 20 more from a similar vein. They are wry, dry, succinct poems; often with a throw-away feel about them, leaving the reader wondering whether he has ducked, or has received, a punch line. Adam and Eve appear as a humorous, somewhat sexy couple who might be sharing, as it were, an apple in a pub. God is one of those omniscient landlords…. These characters get through the opening-hours of sin, knowled...

The better part of Figures of Speech, or at least the more assimilable part, is a private view of Bangkok and Japan, with the author's comments on the East-West imbroglio and what Unesco calls the mutual appreciation of cultural values. It's Mr Enright's own voice one hears detailing the traps and vanities of university life, embassy parties and literary gatherings—and in his characters' observations on the equivocal scene…. [Mattie is a] Chinese typist on holiday f...

['A Faust Book'] is full of cunning literary allusions and learned puns (of which I probably missed as many as I recognised) and the perfect reader of Enright's book would be a widely read don with something of his own donnish turn of mind. Considered only in these terms Enright's 'Faust' is a very funny book. He has a great knack for sliding from the sixteenth century into our own and back again; and much of the humour comes from comic and pointed anachronisms. But...

D. J. Enright is a poet preoccupied with responsibilities. He is an itinerant and committed, if lazy moralist, not positively seeking to squeeze out a moral from experience, but doggedly prepared to confront any moral that obtrudes itself on him—and thousands do. His sytle reflects this moral stance. The poems [in Daughters of Earth] spar about rather loosely to begin with, without especial finesse, before going in to deliver their upper-cut. This they deliver with great precision: the punches of thi...

It seemed well-trodden ground for D. J. Enright to cover in Paradise Illustrated, his sequence of poems updating the Fall; I thought the joke had been better done by other, less sophis ticated, artists. Now, in A Faust Book, he has followed the exhortations of Heine and Valéry to do your own Faust, and come up with an altogether subtler, funnier and more sustained set of personal variations on the legend. His Faust and Mephistopheles are, for one thing, not put so relentlessly through all the latest ...

[Enright's Daughters of Earth is] a better volume than he has recently given us, more varied and less repetitive, more obliquely subtle yet also more trenchant. And the pictures of life in Singapore and Japan in his [Foreign Devils] … seem sharper than usual; and name names. Enright is still writing with a despairing smile about a teacher's failure to communicate, about the pretensions of governments and the miseries of peoples in poor or 'developing' countries ('To...

I have always respected D. J. Enright, a useful all-rounder; critic, poet, teacher, novelist. [In Figures of Speech] he has not greatly extended himself: alternatively, as they say, he is 'writing comfortably within his reach.' I don't mean that the poet-critic is condescending to the wider public. He has achieved real comedy, entertaining, often witty, about intellectual life and love in Bangkok and Tokyo, while making things easy for himself with the sitting targets of cultural nannie...

The thesis that all liberals become defeatist reactionaries is one which D. J. Enright could see off wittily—has done so, indeed, in earlier poems. But [in The Old Adam] his pleas for the old Adam—private, disorganised, indecisive man—take him into strange waters, whose subtlety contains some less subtle fish…. He is nothing if not a civilised grumbler, detached even from his own detachment. It's a privileged position, whose cost, as he recognises, sometimes falls on other...

[The Apothecary's Shop] is an extremely lively, sensitive and sensible collection of critical essays, varying greatly in subject matter and in quantity. Some of the material—"On Not Teaching The Cocktail Party" and "The Use of Poetry" for example—was not really worth reprinting, but what remains reflects a vigorous and wide-ranging mind, and one which detests the vast amount of nonsense in much modern criticism…. Mr. Enright's forthrightness and...

[Enright's] personal commitment has been profound, and often courageous. But it has resulted in his verse becoming a sustained lament for the ineffectualness of art—'man's slight nonmurderousness'—in a world controlled by politics and economics. It is hard to see how much more can be got out of this theme after the present volume [Unlawful Assembly], although the writing is as sensitive and likeable as ever. Unlawful Assembly repeats the topics and attitudes of seve...

[In Unlawful Assembly the] conversational, ironical tone of poems that are more like footnotes to experience than anything more ambitious, is immensely pleasing…. Commonsense and humour run through this whole collection ('ordinariness has much to be said for it'). Control is good, the effects are achieved—though sometimes with a certain amount of discursiveness ('Processional') and sometimes with too much of the footnote's curtness ('Cultural Freedom&#...

Comic updatings of old tales rarely work well, whereas serious ones get away with it too often. D. J. Enright has made it clear that his intentions in Paradise Illustrated are at least fairly serious, but he is much too witty and clever a writer to let solemn truths about the Fall of Man drop too heavily from his typewriter. The result, in this long sequence about Adam and Eve, is an uncomfortable mixture: some of the jokes come off…. And some of them sink to depths of homeliness plumbed more often b...

The best … of this year's books on Shakespeare is D. J. Enright's Shakespeare and the Students…. It is relaxed and non-theoretical. It arises not only from teaching Shakespeare (as its author explains) but from an experience of life and poetry. There is no mystical pursuit of Shakespeare, no embarrassing attempt to expose a Christian or neo-Platonic "pattern": the approach is in the essentially human terms of psychology and poetry. It is truly eclectic (not in the n...