John Enright's Two Bad Things In Infant School

Although the 1920s were clearly a dire decade for many families, Enright frequently writes of those experiences with affection and a lack of prejudice. Although the poems are clearly Enright’s most confessional work, chronic misery, because it is ordinary and unexceptional, this not bring him closer to religion as he says: “I cannot recall one elevated moment in church” (Enright, Collected Poems 134). He asserts in “Sunday” yet he was sent to the church because his mother who was non catholic thought that the experience may be useful later on. His further disturbing experience of religion is found in Christmas poems. In “Two Bad Things in Infant School” he recalls the worst experiences where religion is at the heart of complaint in his childhood.

“On the Death of a child” shows a strongly felt resistance to any excess of emotion. The words are allowed to determine their own intense and tightly bound system of relationships: the intellect takes control of situation. It is this lack of thought in poetry for which Enright and the other Movement poets criticize Dylan Thomas. Enright explains that Thomas’s poetry is obscure and deficient in intellectual conviction. Similar view is adapted by Conquest in his Introduction to the Newlines. Conquest calls for a renewed attention to the ‘necessary intellectual component’ in poetry, viewed from commonsense standpoint. With this conviction in mind “On the Death of a child” is consciously meant to be a revision of Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire of a child in London”. Structurally “On the Death of a child” counteracts “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire of a child in London”. The latter is a more elaborate experiment in syntax and imagery than the former. While Enright’s poem consists of short stanzas and short sentences, Thomas’s opening sentence stretches for fourteen