Dennis Joseph Enright (March 11 1920 – December 31 2002) was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic, and general man of letters.

He was born in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, and educated at Leamington College and Downing College, Cambridge. After graduating in he held academic positions outside the United Kingdom: in Egypt, Japan, Thailand and notably in Singapore (from 1960). He at times attributed his lack of success in finding a post closer to home to writing for Scrutiny and his short association with F. R. Leavis; whose influence he mainly and early, but not entirely, rejected.

As a poet he was identified with the Movement. His 1955 anthology, Poets of the 1950's, served to delineate the group of British poets in question — albeit somewhat remotely and retrospectively, since he was abroad and it was not as prominent as the Robert Conquest collection New Lines of the following year.

Returning to London in 1970, he edited Encounter magazine, with Melvin J. Lasky , for two years. He subsequently worked in publishing.

Works

• A Commentary on Goethe's Faust (1949)
• The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems (1953)
• Poets of the 1950's (1955) editor, anthology
• Academic Year (1955) novel
• The World of Dew: Aspects of Living Japan (1955)
• Bread Rather than Blossoms (1956) poems
• The Year of the Monkey (1956) poems
• The Apothecary's Shop (1957) essays
• Heaven Knows Where (1957) novel
• The Poetry of Living Japan (1958) editor with Takamichi Ninomiya
• Insufficient Poppy (1960) novel
• Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism (1960)
• Some Men Are Brothers (1960) poems
• Addictions (1962) poems
• English Critical Texts 16th Century to 20th Century (1963) editor with Ernst de Chickera
• The Old Adam (1965)
• Conspirators and Poets (1966) essays
• Selected Poems (1968)
• Unlawful Assembly (1968) poems
• Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969)
• Shakespeare And The Students (1970)
• In the Basilica of the Annunciation (1971) broadsheet poem
• Daughters of Earth (1972) poems
• Foreign Devils (1972) poems
• Man is an Onion: Reviews and Essays (1972)
• The Terrible Shears - Scenes from a Twenties Childhood (1973)
• Rhyme times rhyme (1974)
• A Choice of Milton's Verse (1975) editor
• Penguin Modern Poets 26 (1975) with Dannie Abse and Michael Longley
• Sad Ires (1975) poems
• The Joke Shop (1976) novel
• Paradise Illustrated (1978) poems
• Wild Ghost Chase (1978) novel
• A Faust Book (1979) poems
• Walking in the Harz Mountains, Faust Senses the Presence of God (1979) poem
• Beyond Land's End (1979) novel
• The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945 –1980 (1980) editor
• Collected Poems (1981)
• A Mania for Sentences: Essays on G. Grass, H. Boll, Frisch, Flaubert & Others (1983)
• Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism (1985) editor
• Instant Chronicles: A Life (1985)
• The Oxford Book of Death (1985) editor
• The Alluring Problem - An Essay on Irony (1986)
• Collected Poems 1987 (1987)
• Fields of Vision: Essays on Literature, Language, and Television (1988)
• Ill at Ease: Writers on Ailments Real and Imagined (1989) editor
• The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets (1989) editor
• Oxford Book of Friendship (1991) editor with David Rawlinson
• Under the Circumstances : Poems and Prose (1991)
• The Way of The Cat (1992)
• Old Men and Comets (1993) poems
• The Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994) editor
• Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995)
• Collected Poems: 1948-1998 (1998)
• Telling Tales (1999)
• Play Resumed: A Journal
• Signs and Wonders: Selected Essays (2001)
• Injury Time (2002)

Reference

• Jaqueline Simms, editor (1990) Life By Other Means. Essays on D.J.Enright