Background

Ethnicity: Dennis Enright's father was an Irish and mother was a Welsh.

Dennis Enright was born on March 11, 1920, in Leamington, Warwickshire. His father was a postman, and his mother was a chapel-goer.

Education

Dennis Enright studied at Leamington College. Also, he earned his master's degree from Downing College in 1946. Dennis got a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Alexandria in 1949.

Career

After education, Dennis Enright lectured at Alexandria in Egypt for three years. Then, he came back to the United Kingdom and started to teach at the University of Birmingham. So he embarked on a long career teaching at foreign universities. Dennis Enright taught at Konan University in Japan from 1953 to 1956, the Free University of Berlin for the next year, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand from 1957 to 1959, and the University of Singapore from 1960 to 1970. His desire to have an open and free curriculum in Singapore caused him to run into some trouble with the restrictive government there, but he was beloved by his students.

Many of Dennis Enright's early poetry collections concern his experiences in Japan and Singapore, including The Laughing Hyena and Bread rather than Blossoms. He also drew on his experiences in Egypt for his novel Academic Year.

In 1970, Enright returned to the United Kingdom to become co-editor of the literary magazine Encounter for two years, followed by a productive eight years at the publishing house Chatto & Windus and a five-year stint, from 1975 to 1980, as an honorary professor of English at Warwick University. Sometimes associated with the Movement, a school of poetry in England during the 1950s and 1960s, Enright wrote movingly about subjects such as poverty and his childhood in simple, usually unrhymed verses in collections such as The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood.

In addition to some two dozen poetry collections, he wrote and edited eleven novels, including three for children, completed fourteen essay collections, edited thirteen other books, and translated books by Colette Portal and Marcel Proust. Toward the end of his life, he completed the memoirs Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book and Play Resumed: A Journal, as well as his Collected Poems and Signs and Wonders: Selected Essays. At the time of his death, Enright had just finished another autobiographical book, Injury Time, that has scheduled for publication in 2003.

Achievements

• Dennis Enright was widely known as a writer and educator. He taught not only in the United Kingdom but also in Egypt, Thailand, and other foreign universities. For his poetic achievements, Dennis was the holder of the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry from the British Society of Authors in 1974 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981. He also got the Order of the British Empire in 1991.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Fair of Speech

    (Can a bomb ever be "clean?" Are we relieved to be warned ...)

    1985
  • The Oxford Book of Friendship

    (In The Oxford Book of Friendship, one of England's best-k...)

    1991
  • Under the Circumstances

    (Peering into the nooks and crannies of circumstance, the ...)

    1991
  • Selected Poems

    (The 138 poems in this volume include short lyrics, haikus...)

    1968
  • The Alluring Problem

    (When Jonathan Swift suggested in 1729, in his pamphlet A ...)

    1986
  • The Oxford Book of the Supernatural

    (From the eerie visitation of Scrooge by Marley's ghost to...)

    1994
  • Interplay

    (This is a brilliant book, full of wit, insight, and intri...)

    1995
  • In Search of Lost Time

    (In Swann's Way, the themes of Proust's masterpiece are in...)

    1992
  • Play Resumed

    (This volume has the same breadth, the same wide range of ...)

    1999
  • The Joke Shop

    (While keeping out of their father's way, Robert and Jane ...)

    1976
  • The Poetry of Living Japan

    (The Poetry of Living Japan is an anthology of the best an...)

    1958
  • Fields of Vision

    (Dennis Enright, the eminent poet, and critic, has here co...)

    1988
  • Collected Poems

    (Including all the poems Dennis Enright wishes to retain, ...)

    1981
  • Collected Poems 1948-1998

    (This major collection culls work from fifteen of Enright'...)

    1998
  • Academic Year

    (This novel involves three expatriate Englishmen teaching ...)

    1955
  • Telling Tales

    (The first, Paradise Illustrated, is a contemporary tellin...)

    1999
  • Collected Poems 1987

    (Collected Poems 1987 replaces Enright's earlier collectio...)

    1987
  • The Oxford Book of Death

    (The inescapable reality of death has given rise to much o...)

    1985
  • Old Men and Comets

    (Old Men and Comets is a new collection of poems and prose...)

    1993
  • The Terrible Shears

    (This book includes autobiographical poems about childhood...)

    1973
  • Signs & Wonders

    (Dennis Enright's essays are all humanist rather than theo...)

    2001
  • Injury Time

    (The book was published after Dennis Enright's death in 20...)

    2003
  • Commentary on Goethe's Faust 1949
  • The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems 1953
  • Poets of the 1950's 1955
  • The World of Dew 1955
  • Bread Rather than Blossoms 1956
  • The Year of the Monkey 1956
  • The Apothecary's Shop 1957
  • Heaven Knows Where 1957
  • Insufficient Poppy 1960
  • Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism 1960
  • Some Men Are Brothers 1960
  • English Critical Texts 1963
  • Conspirators and Poets 1966
  • Unlawful Assembly 1968
  • Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor 1969
  • Shakespeare And The Students 1970
  • In the Basilica of the Annunciation 1971
  • Daughters of Earth 1972
  • Foreign Devils 1972
  • Man is an Onion 1972
  • A Choice of Milton's Verse 1975
  • Penguin Modern Poets 26 1975
  • Sad Ires and Others 1975
  • Wild Ghost Chase 1978
  • Faust Book 1979
  • Walking in the Harz Mountains, Faust senses the presence of God 1979
  • Beyond Land's End 1979
  • The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945 - 1980 1980
  • Instant Chronicles 1985
  • Ill at Ease 1989
  • The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets 1989
  • Selected Poems 1990 1990
  • The Way of the Cat 1992

Views

Quotations: "Art does not begin in a test-tube. It does not take its origin in good sentiments and clean-shaven, upstanding young thoughts."

"Leave the people free to make their own mistakes, to suffer, and to discover. Authority must leave us to fight even that deadly battle over whether or not to enter a place of entertainment wherein lurks a juke-box, and whether or not to slip a coin into the machine."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Jeremy Lewis: "Dennis Enright was the most lovable of men, and a writer of rare distinction."
  
  John Russell Taylor: "Enright is a major poet who quietly but insistently reminds us that civilization still matters."

Connections

Dennis Enright had a wife, Madeleine. They had a daughter.

Wife:

Madeleine Enright

References

• D. J. Enright: Poet of Humanism
  1974
• Life by Other Means: Essays on D. J. Enright
  1990