Enright, Dennis Joseph

(1920-2002)

   D.J. Enright was born at Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and graduated M.A. from Downing College, Cambridge. From 1947 to 1959 he taught English in Japan, Germany, Thailand, and Singapore. He was joint editor of Encounter in London (1970-1972) and from 1975 to 1980 was honorary professor at Warwick University. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969), relates his years abroad, as do his four novels and his poems. Joke Shop (1976) and Wild Ghost Chase (1978) are two books for children. He also published volumes of literary criticism: Figures of Speech (1965), A Mania for Sentences (1983), Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism (1985), and The Alluring Problem (1986). Not drawn into sentimentalism, his poems express his dismay and distress at squalor, poverty, cruelty, and suffering. His first collection of poems, The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems (1953), was followed by several others, the last being Collected Poems: 1948-1998 (1998). Some of his poems: "A Child's Guide to Welfare," "After Brecht," "Apocalypse," "Better Be Kind to Them Now," "Paradise Illustrated," "The Egyptian Cat," "The Last Democrat," "The Monuments of Hiroshima."

   Sources: Don't Forget to Fly: A Cycle of Modern Poems. Paul B. Janeczko, ed. Bradbury Press, 1981. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. Never Such Innocence: A New Anthology of Great War Verse. Martin Stephen, ed. Buchan and Enright, 1988. Pet Poems. Robert Fisher, ed. Faber and Faber, 1989. The Antaeus Anthology. Daniel Halpern, ed. Bantam Books, 1986. The New Modern Poetry: British and American Poetry Since World War II. M.L. Rosenthal, ed. Macmillan, 1967. The Oxford Book of Comic Verse. John Gross, ed. Oxford University Press, 1994. The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, 1945-1980. D.J. Enright, ed. Oxford University Press, 1980. The Oxford Book of Friendship. D.J. Enright and David Rawlinson, eds. Oxford University Press, 1991. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).