Volume 47, Number 3 · February 24, 2000
Life Itself
By Helen Vendler
Collected Poems, 1948-1998
by D.J. Enright
Oxford University Press, 508 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Dennis Joseph Enright, a British poet born in 1920 and still writing, spent his active life as a professor of English literature, mostly abroad. Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor[*] is his witty and often appalling account of that life, its title derived from the official reproof he received in 1960 from the minis-ter for labor in Singapore. Enright, during his inaugural university lecture on Robert Graves, had called for freedom of cultural expression, and criticized confected displays of governmentally acceptable 'culture.' The ministerial document reads in part:
Review, 4850 words
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