The proper place to begin a study of Wain's poetry is with the examination of his basic premise: human goodness and love shall outlast violence and brutality. He is willing to admit to man's instinctive selfishness …, but human interaction ultimately transcends and overcomes petty individual inadequacies. Wain traces the source of the violence in the world to mechanization, industrialization, and the consequent dehumanization of modern society. Western civilization, he says, no longer b...

Wain is a poet of large ambitions. His early enthusiasm for the Augustan poets has left its mark on his work, not least in his hankering to make "major statements" and execute grand designs. About eight years ago in his Letters to Five Artists Wain employed Pope's favorite form in a wide-ranging exploration of the creative process. More recently he has been inclined to compete with the statements of major English writers; or rather, to place his personal imprint upon familiar materials....

John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose first novels, "Hurry on Down" and "Lucky Jim," came out the same year, 1953, formed the most considerable part of the not particularly well-named Angry Young Man group in postwar English letters…. [Both] have been quite versatile and complete writers in that they write excellent poetry and criticism along with their novels and short stories. (p. 14) [But they] are really very different sorts of writer. Mr. Amis's talent is comic an...

Traces of John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov appear in John Wain's The Pardoner's Tale…. The book begins as an action-filled narrative centering on a missing person, a presumed kidnapping, and a sexual encounter having the flavor of adolescent fantasy…. The balance of the book shuttles between the "real" and the "invented" stories, following two complicated liaisons…. In the sequel both male protagonists get exactly what they want, establishing Th...

The story on which you first embark in The Pardoner's Tale is told in the first person by 40-ish Gus, on holiday in Wales to escape the boredom of suburbia and a failed marriage. He rescues an attractive young actress from death by drowning, takes her to his cottage and goes to bed with her: she, too, is on the run from a broken marriage. In the morning, she has disappeared, leaving a note saying that it is better for her 'to come and go like a ghost'. He searches for her in London and ...

[Wain's] verse way [in "Letters to Five Artists"] is to combine the sonorously slack and portentous tones of late Eliot with the informal chat of Auden and the broken eye-rhythms of W. C. Williams. All on the surface, you see, for easy scanning. Not exactly a pastiche though; a synthesis, rather, of what these poets have left for the serious poet writing in England today: a means of talking intelligently about what matters—the fate of the single spirit in this world…. [Exi...

[John Wain] typifies the very best of what one might call "Englishness"—good sense, moderation, a feeling for language, erudition without pretension, and wit. The essays [in Professing Poetry] cover a wide variety of topics related to poetry and poets, and what comes through in all of them is Wain's deep love for poetry, his delight in sharing with us what he finds valuable. This is true particularly in the essays that deal with the work of individual poets—Auden, Emily Di...

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 Wi...

The Pardoner's Tale tells the stories of two men, both "forty-ish", who cannot help falling madly in love, sometimes despairingly, sometimes with great success. The lineaments of gratified desire are persuasively drawn. Precise details of plot and character dissolve into an amorous haze, spreading delight…. The two stories are ingeniously linked…. [The] linking method has been deliberately designed to make it difficult for John Wain's narrative to carry conviction, ...

Wain can be as quixotic as our own Southern "Fugitive" poets (whose work he intensely admires). Like Allen Tate's Aneas, he has "an infallible instinct for the right battle on the passionate side." Unfortunately, he sometimes lacks the irony that would save him from the excess of insisting, "only in the sphere of art is humanity able to rise totally above its failures and inadequacies." One is also embarrassed to be told that in reading poetry, "we see...

Hurry On Down is back sporting hard covers to celebrate 25 years in the business. Wain's new introduction repeats, for those who might have forgotten, that he was angry before any of the others were. Do the 'Angries' still speak to our condition? The question is, of course, false. There never was such an obligingly tidy movement, only a mood variously expressed. As comic narrative, the picaresque fortunes of Charles Lumley begin to date. The present inclination turns away from anger to ...

Feng, it seems, was the original of Shakespeare's Claudius, and [John Wain's Feng] takes him as the protagonist of the Hamlet drama…. Feng's inner life, such as it is, remains strikingly tedious; he comes through in his prose-monologues as a garrulous bore. Nothing in the poem really comes alive: it's a savage, violent society and a harrowing plot, but all this is curiously tamed and toned down, filtered through a sensibility too equable, domesticated and undramatic to be ...