English literature the book is designed to acquaint students with the main outlines

John Wain (1925 - 1994)
John Wain was bom in Staffordshire and educated at Newcastle High School and the Oxford University. From 1946 to 1949 he was a Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, and then a lecturer in English literature at Reading University, Berkshire.
John Wain’s first novel “Hurry on Down” was published in 1953 and the literary critics immediately placed his name at the top of the list “Angry Young Men” group. The novel portrays a
young man who hasjust left University. He tries to find his proper place in life but fails. His feeling of being a displaced person runs through the whole novel.
Wain’s criticism of contemporary life becomes increasingly serious with the further progress ofhis literary career. In his novels he describes the difficulty of survival in the modern world if one wants to preserve his real self in intrusive and demanding sur­ roundings. Wain’s other novels include “ Living in the Present” (1955), “The Contenders” (1958), “A Travel ling Woman” (1959), “Strike the Father Dead” (1962), “The Young Visitors” (1965), “The Smaller Sky” (1967), “A Winter in the Hills” (1970), “The Pardoner’s Tale” (1978), “Lizzie’s Floating Shop” (1981), “Young Shoulders” (1982).
John Wain is also a distinguished poet and literary critic. He published several volumes of verse including “Mixed Feel­ ings” (1951), “A Word Carved on a Sill” (1956), “Weep Before God” (1961), “Wildtrack” (1965) and “Poems 1949-1979”.

Ted Hughes

(1930-1998)

.pid)
-v
•- '.-J

йй .rda^{..'-С. ...}

Ted Hughes is known chiefly for his portrayal ofthe violence and fierce beauty of the natural world. He was bom in Yorkshire.

He took a degree at Cambridge, where he was primarily interested in folklore and anthropology. In 1956 he married an American poet, the late Sylvia Plath. His first book of poetry “The Hawk in the Rain” appeared in 1957.
Much of Ted Hughes poetry deals with the natural world. He frequently writes of the savagery and cunning of animals and of similarqualities in human beings. It is characteristic of Hughes’s verse to use plants, objects or animals as symbols of some larger general concept. His creatures are powerful and watchful. Like Aesop, Hughes portrays animals in terms that carry messages about human nature. But his messages are seldom moralistic or reassuring. His works show a variety of influences: folklore, mythology, anthropology, as well as the poetry of Thomas Hardy,
D.H Lawrence, and Robert Graves.
Hughes’s second book of poetry, “Lupercal”, won England’s prestigious Hawthomden Prize in 1961. “Wodwo”., a compilation of both poetiy and prose, including short stories and a radio play, was published in 1967.
Here, below, is one of the poems included into Ted Hughes’s “Wodwo”, which shows the poet’s keen observation of nature and natural processes:


Firn
Here is the firn’s frond, unfurling a gesture
Like a conductor whose music will now be pause And the one note of silence
To which the whole earth dances gravely.

The mouse’s ear unfurls its trust, The spider takes up her bequest, And the retina

Rains the creation with a bridle of water.

And, among them, the fem Dances gravely, like the plume

.Of a warrior returning, under the law hills, Into his own kingdom.
In 1970 a cycle of poems “Crow” came into being and became a best-seller. In it Hughes attempts to create a fragmentary mythology. In addition to verse, Hughes has written a number of plays and several books for children.
Some critics have attacked Hughes for the grimness of his poetic subject matter and the violence of his language, but his admirers contend, that his language is vibrant and passionate, and that his recognition of violence in ms.n and nature is a valid perception.
In 1984 Hughes was appointed a poet laureate.