John Wain 

Selected Poems and Memoirs

John Wain was one of the so-called Angry Young Men of the 1950s, the generation that redefined literature. Best known for his ground-breaking novel, Hurry On Down, and his award-winning biography of Dr Johnson, he was also an accomplished critic, author and dramatist, and one of Britain's major post-War poets. This new selection spans his entire poetic career and includes work from all his major collections and book-length poems as well as previously unpublished verses and the beginnings of his unfinished memoirs. With this selection John Wain is reinstated as a major English writer.

 John Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1925 and educated locally and as St John's College, Oxford, where he was taught by C.S. Lewis and where his contemporaries included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote 13 novels and produced seven collections of verse as well as many other works. He settled in Oxford in 1963, where he was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1973 - 1978 and awarded the CBE for services to literature in 1986. John Wain died in 1994.

'He seems to continually move from one kind of work to another, always with new insights, and new ways of growing' Peter Levi, former Oxford Professor of Poetry. 

'Ah, you nimble, unclassifiable master of all the forms, fed by an energy I can only guess at' Philip Larkin, in correspondence with the poet.