The proper place to begin a study of Wain's poetry is with the examination of his basic premise: human goodness and love shall outlast violence and brutality. He is willing to admit to man's instinctive selfishness …, but human interaction ultimately transcends and overcomes petty individual inadequacies. Wain traces the source of the violence in the world to mechanization, industrialization, and the consequent dehumanization of modern society. Western civilization, he says, no longer breeds loving, feeling individuals but automatons who, having lost their identity, are ready to pass on to others the psychological violence of which they themselves are victims. Violence breeds greater violence, and the destructive forces that are loose in the world must be brought under control. Finally, he examines the artist's role in a world of violence. In a predictably evasive manner, he insists that the artist must not escape from his responsibilities by submission to the forces of destruction, but must rise above the violence and in this way withstand the onslaught of the darkness.

Again and again it is evident that poems written from the neohumanistic conviction are means of escape rather than of confrontation. As if in answer to those poets who have committed themselves with more abandon, these poets see small hope for those who struggle against violence…. With the poetry presently under discussion, I feel there is no real desire for new insights, or new understanding of violence, but only an intellectual evasion of its implications.

John Wain assumes the role of spokesman for the neohumanistic position with some vigor both in his poetry and in his critical remarks. He has made it quite clear that he considers those poets who are searching into the secret recesses of the psyche in an attempt to come to terms with the modern consciousness inferior to those whose assumptions about human nature are more stable and who are thus able to suggest cures for the illness…. [The fault] lies not with Wain's humanism but with the narrow and crippling limitations he imposes upon it. He carries this to such a point that he accuses those who hold skeptical or cynical attitudes towards the modern world of inventing their pessimism…. (pp. 131-32)

Wain does not exhibit a continuing evolution of theme from his early poetry to his later. His style, on the other hand, developed markedly in Wildtrack (1965) and Letters to Five Artists (1970)…. [He] seems to use an expanding style to compensate for a static, overburdened theme. (p. 132)

The victory of humanity over violence becomes a major theme in Wain's poetry, and he sees the vocal assertion of the human element over everything else as a primary function of the artist: "The artist's function is always to humanize the society he is living in, to assert the importance of humanity in the teeth of whatever is currently trying to annihilate that importance." The early poems of A Word Carved on a Sill show the poet striving to write according to this prescription….

["When It Comes" illustrates] a major failing in Wain's humanistic stance, for while expressing sentiments of private compassion, [it fails] to come to terms with the situation at hand. The poet's emotions are not directed towards the violence and savagery that is visited upon the hundreds of thousands of suffering human beings, but he thinks of those who are not yet born, those who will never have to suffer. Although our first response might well be, "What a compassionate man this poet is!" the tone of the poem suggests that its object is not the suffering of others, but the ennobling of the self through high-minded thoughts in the face of death. (p. 133)

The forces of violence are seen [in "Patriotic Poem"] as ineffective against the ennobled human spirit reinforced by patriotic concerns. But Wain again reneges somewhat on his commitment, for in this triumph of humanity over the base powers of war, the people surrender an element of their individuality to their country:

    Rises the living breath of all her children;
    And her deep heart and theirs, who can distinguish?

The repetition of such sentiments as this soon degenerates into humanistic doggerel, and the humanism runs very thin. He attempts to elevate humanity in both these poems, but the price ultimately is too high. It is usually at the cost of some greater virtue that he is able to extol the lesser.

This compromise is unfortunate, for at times Wain achieves a remarkable poetic insight into the psychic violence of the modern condition. "To a Friend in Trouble" brings together elements found in Gunn and Plath in an effective fusion. The loss of love in this poem is traced to the loss of other values, and this relation is expressed in a series of violent images…. [The] loss of love is not a personal event but one in which all who live in the modern world share…. Wain rises to greater compassion in this poem than in "When It Comes" because he admits his own helplessness and participation in the selfishness of the world without becoming self-indulgent. (pp. 133-34)

This poem is held together by a fine tension exemplified by the ambiguous role of the speaker as both observer and participant. But Wain does not often lower himself to the role of participant; he is more frequently seen as the detached observer making moral judgments upon the world. It is in this position that he undoes the fine touches of a poem like "To A Friend in Trouble." (p. 135)

Two of Wain's most impressive poems explore violence as a destructive force from which the world must turn away. "A Song about Major Eatherly" and "On the Death of a Murderer" trace the disintegrating effects that violence has, not upon its victims, but upon those who initiate such action and also upon those who observe it. Violence is seen as a chain of reaction whose destructive effects cannot be stopped once set in motion.

"A Song about Major Eatherly" examines the gradual metamorphosis into a madman of the man who supposedly piloted the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. "Good news," says the poet, "It seems he loved them after all."… The "good news" is that Major Eatherly took upon himself the moral burden of his actions and rescued himself from the greater spiritual destruction. In piloting the plane that carried such devastation to its goal, he had resigned his humanity, for he had allowed himself to be used as an instrument rather than as a man…. There is, however, danger in this acknowledgment, for those who had earlier seen this action as a great patriotic act now must respond out of guilt, for in accepting himself as guilty, Eatherly is also pointing a finger at that society that produced and supported his actions. He the destroyer then becomes a victim in his own society…. Eatherly's atonement is not a symbolic act. He is no scapegoat, for his repentance does not take away the common guilt; it rather increases it and calls forth greater violence in his hostile imprisonment…. (pp. 137-38)

The emotions that Wain expresses in this poem are easy to participate in, almost too inviting. And such emotions are exceedingly difficult to attack from a humanistic standpoint. However, it is precisely at this point that we can show why and how the neohumanistic response to violence is evasive. William Bradford Huie's book The Hiroshima Pilot exploded the myth that Eatherly piloted the plane that dropped the bomb and later was driven to self-destructive criminal acts through guilt for his part in the bombing. In reality, Eatherly commanded the advance weather plane (he was far away from Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped), and his conversion to pacifism grew more out of his earlier psychological problems that were intensified by his deep resentment that he was not given any publicity or fanfare for his role in the Hiroshima bombing than from a sense of profound moral guilt…. Wain is not guilty of purposefully distorting the truth, but I believe it exposes a humanistic laziness in his overall mentality, that in finding a mythologized story that fits his moral outlook, he adopts that as fact and uses it as a moral sledgehammer.

Again and again the poem is marred by the poet's compulsion to philosophize and moralize, as though he were unable to make his point through mere presentation…. And at the very end the poet shows that his sympathies are neither with Major Eatherly nor with the society that he represents; the humanizing impact, which he imposes upon the reader too energetically, is that the bomber pilot has taught us to reject violence…. (p. 138)

[In] a poem like "On the Death of a Murderer," in which Wain himself is the horrified analyst of modern violence, he feels compelled not to let his observation stand on its own merits and he intervenes with offensive nonpoetic explanations and recommendations. Rather than integrate his message into the expressive part of his art, he frequently sets off sections of didactic verse within a poem in order to emphasize his theme. His moral concerns appear to be so great that he fears they may be lost in the artistic process. Certainly we can expect Wain, who has shown himself to be an astute critic in his own right, to be more aware of the relation between propaganda and art, and the necessity for integrating the two; and he should be conscious of how his refusal to subordinate the former to the latter affects his poetry.

It is perhaps this tension in his artistic credo that induces him to write poems about his own art and the art of others. One third of Weep before God is a long poem called "A Boisterous Poem about Poetry." A more recent book of poetry, Letters to Five Artists, discusses the lives and art of five friends…. In both of these works Wain philosophizes about his own theory of art and poetry, and his recommendations are an obvious defense of his own poetical position. They are more philosophical reflection than poetry, and he continuously praises those who share his own particular view of the creative artist. (p. 141)

"A Boisterous Poem about Poetry" is a response to the malaise of the late 1950s in which many were asserting that British poetry had exhausted itself…. Wain suggests that the gloom-mongers were too willing to entomb the spirit of modern poetry…. There are serious poets and fickle poets, the accomplished and the uninitiated. His distinctions rest upon strange grounds, for it is the amateur poet, according to Wain, who concerns himself with the dark side of life: violence, cruelty, sorrow, despair…. The serious poet, on the other hand, is an ameliorator, who observes an unbalanced situation and sets out to rectify it. In his role as healer and savior, the serious poet is somehow able to call on the hidden resources of language to effect his ends, while the poet with his "bag of despair" can only "rattle on tin cans/And claim that [he is] singing."… (pp. 141-42)

In "Introductory Poem" to Letters to Five Artists, he suggests that the artist must not be preoccupied with understanding the violence in which his world is drowning. The poet … is a lyrical recorder who must make others lament and weep over, not understand, such violence…. (p. 143)

The deficiency in Wain's philosophy is that the major problems of mankind are not confronted, or, if they are, only obliquely. Poetry becomes, from his point of view, an assertion of optimism, a refusal to open one's eyes in the dark…. Wain's uncompromising humanism demands the affirmative voice even when events might lead elsewhere. By rejecting analysis and inquiry for indiscriminate assertion, his humanism must be seen as less than adequate for our moment. (p. 144)