Jeffrey Wainwright has become widely respected as a poet and critic since his work first appeared in periodicals during the 1960s. His poetry has developed with an unswerving self-conscious discipline that has gone hand in hand with the critical integrity shown in articles in Agenda,Stand, and PN Review. His critical consciousness and his feelings for the morally precarious nature of poetry have led him to publish relatively few poems, but those collected in Heart's Desire (1978) have enormous internal energy as well as making a range of demands on the reader which belies their scale.

Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent, in the English Industrial Midlands, to Sidney and Nellie Wainwright. Attending the grammar school where Charles Tomlinson had been a pupil, he had developed an interest in writing as well as in reading widely in modern poetry before he went to study English at the University of Leeds...