SOURCE: "Did Nobody Teach You?" in Encounter, Vol. XXXVI, No. 6, June, 1971, pp. 53-7.

Enright is an English author who has spent most of his career abroad, teaching English literature at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore. The author of critically respected works in a variety of genres, he is best known for his poetry, which is conversational in style and often reflects his humanistic values through portraits of Far Eastern life. According to William Walsh, "Enright is a poet with a bias toward light and intelligibility, " and his critical essays are frequently marked by sardonic treatment of what he considers the culturally pretentious in literature. In the essay below, he discusses the "unromantic" characteristics of Smith's poetry.

The vivacious narrator of Novel on Yellow Paper, who claims to have written a long poem entitled "La Fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë", declares a constitutional preference for...