Collected Poems E-Book

Anthony Burgess

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-93) was an industrious writer. He published over fifty books, thousands of essays and numerous drafts and fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its range of themes are all to be found too in Burgess's poetry, an area of his work where he was at once most free and most experimental. It is his least exposed and most complex and eloquent area of achievement, now revealed at last in all its richness. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness mark every page.

Leseprobe

ANTHONY BURGESS

Collected Poems

CARCANET CLASSICS INCLUDE

Dictator/Gilgamesh adapted by Philip Terry

Gilgamesh Retold by Jenny Lewis

Pearl translated by Jane Draycott

Edmund Blunden, Selected Poems edited by Robyn Marsack

Catullus, The Books of Catullus translated by Simon Smith

Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe: Collected Poems

John Heath-Stubbs, Selected Poems edited by John Clegg

Walter Pater, Selected Essays edited by Alex Wong

Propertius, Poems translated by Patrick Worsnip

Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations translated by John Ashbery

George Seferis, Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Charles Tomlinson, Swimming Chenango Lake: selected poemsedited by David Morley

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, volumes I and IIedited by Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan

ANTHONY BURGESS

Collected Poems

Edited with an introduction by Jonathan Mann

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ANTHONY BURGESS

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917–93) was an industrious writer. Through over fifty published books, thousands of essays, and countless other drafts and fragments, he articulated the struggles, freedoms and changes that he saw around him, and predicted many more to come. Perhaps his most famous example is A Clockwork Orange (1962), originally an indifferently-received novella which was later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, and provided Burgess with plentiful opportunities to explain his particular artistic vision. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal devices used to contain them, and its remarkable range of themes are all firmly present in Burgess’s poetry.

Now he no longer appears on our screens, it is easy to forget that Burgess was an irrepressible international literary figure whose work was disseminated through the mass media of the 1970s and 1980s. He was many things at once, some of them seemingly irreconcilable. There are in fact many Burgesses to choose from: novelist, composer, teacher, drinker, linguist, husband, rebel, journalist, diarist, extrovert, family man, cook, smoker, art critic, literary critic, television critic, television personality, collector of matchbooks, and – last but not least – poet. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism, and fondness for variousness echoes equally through his music, his novels, his journalism and his literary criticism. These aesthetic competences are abundantly represented in this book.

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ANTHONY BURGESS

Anthony Burgess

Edited with an introduction by Jonathan Mann

Per Liana e Antonio

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Longer Poems, Sequences, and Narrative Works

An Essay on Censorship

Belli’s Blasphemous Bible

Moses

Poems Written for St Winefred’s Well

The Pet Beast

Signs (Dogs of Peace)

‘Augustine and Pelagius’

The Princely Progress

Five Revolutionary Sonnets

To Vladimir Nabokov On His 70th Birthday

The Sword

O Lord, O Ford, God Help Us, Also You

Personal Verse, Vignettes, and Other Short Work

Words for Music

Endnotes

Sources and Further Reading

Alphabetical List of Titles or First Lines

INTRODUCTION

Anthony Burgess was a versatile and productive poet whose career began in 1935 when a few adolescent poems were published in Manchester Xaverian College’s magazine The Electron. Over the course of his career, Burgess wrote many hundreds of poems, lyrics, fragments, and occasional verses – everything from epic poetry to linguistically innovative experiments. Most of his novels include original poetry, frequently as a central plot device. This is especially evident in the Enderby novels, which feature poems written by Burgess but published under the fictional nom de plume F.X. Enderby. Notably, his words for music were heard on and off Broadway, and almost featured in a Warner Brothers film (Will!, 1968). The 1973 musical Cyrano (starring Christopher Plummer) was a commercial success thanks in no small part to Burgess’s verse. Burgess’s 1976 epic verse novel Moses was the literary product of an equally epic Italian television series. Likewise, the verses and songs from Burgess’s Man of Nazareth (1979) arose out of a collaboration with the award-winning film and television director Franco Zeffirelli. His poetry career ended with a remarkable novel in verse (Byrne, posthumously published 1995), whose form was borrowed from Byron.

In his autobiography You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess says he sent his poems to T. S. Eliot, who sent back a mildly approving letter of rejection. Whilst that letter remains unfound, another letter in a private collection shows that, in 1954, Burgess’s poetry was subject to the formal scrutiny of another literary critic. Gareth Lloyd-Evans, a noted Shakespearean scholar, judged Burgess’s poetry as a part of a competition held by his local newspaper. Burgess won the competition, and saw his work published on the front page of the Banbury Guardian on 27 May 1954. In his note to the winner, the judge praised Burgess’s imagery and linguistic innovation, but found his rhythm a little shaky. The short note is (so far) the only available review of Burgess’s earlier poetry by an informed contemporary critic, who found:

These are very accomplished poems indeed, and I suspect you are an old hand at the game. Have you published? If you haven’t, then you ought to, immediately. I find your imagery particularly exacting – e.g. in Sonnet 1. The image of the cock is brilliant. The ‘idea’ in Sonnet 1 is simple enough, but your language has given it a depth (almost a mystery) which is most satisfying. You might look over your rhythm again – it is occasionally jerky – noticeably so in Sonnet 2 where the transition from line 8 to 9 is rhythmically awkward. Congratulations on two first rate poems which easily take the prize.

The critical note is signed ‘G.L.E.’. The two sonnets in question were ‘A dream yes, but for everyone the same’ and ‘They lit the sun, and their day began’, part of the Revolutionary Sonnets sequence. Writing about this competition, Burgess notes that the newspaper regretted having to publish his poems. ‘What the readers of the Banbury Guardian made of this sonnet’, he says, ‘was never recorded’.1

Another analysis of a Burgess poem came from the poet himself in the 1970s. Perhaps as a literary joke, Burgess reviewed a poem by F.X. Enderby in They Wrote in English, an anthology of major Western writers.2 That poem is ‘Garrison Town, Evening’ (see p. 00). As the only available example of Burgess explicating his own poetry at length, it is worth reproducing here:

The opening line is a reminiscence of the opening line of a song by Henry Purcell – ‘Nymphs and shepherds, come away.’ The scene is a town in which a great number of soldiers are stationed in wartime. In the evening they emerge from their barracks and look for girls, who are willing to be looked for. Thus, Faunus, the god of fertility or certainly physical love, uncovers what was hidden during the day – the libido, or human will. This reminds the poet of the philosopher Schopenhauer, who taught that the only real thing in nature was a huge impersonal Will, or ‘Wille,’ that created illusions or phenomena or representations (‘Vorstellungen’) which we take for reality. The ‘Wille’ is a cinema projector, and it projects these ‘Vorstellungen’ (German for cinema shows) on to a screen. The projector is also a penis, and also a pig’s snout, thoroughly bestial. Pigs thrust their snouts into the earth, looking for truffles. Low girls, or doxies (an Elizabethan term), instead of being ill-favoured and pimply, become matt, smooth, silver screens. The projectors or penises of the soldiers, expressive of the great natural Will, shine light [on] them which makes them appear attractive. Their ‘trappings of the sport’ are those physical appurtenances which are engaged in the act of sex. An ejaculation is achieved, and it is likened to a fiery rocket shooting high into the air. At the moment of ejaculation the girls seemed at their most beautiful. But there is an immediate revulsion of ‘tristia post coitum’, and this is likened to the theory of another German philosopher, Spengler, who in his ‘Decline of the West’ says that all civilisations decay, tracing a falling curve or parabola.3

The decision to include and review the poetry of his fictional alter ego may have been a literary joke, or a convenient way to explain a favourite own poem. Either way, it demonstrates that Burgess wished to explain the poem. It was not the first time he reviewed his own work. In 1968, Burgess lost his job at the Yorkshire Post when he supplied an unflattering review of Inside Mr Enderby. Later, in This Man and Music (1982), Burgess discussed his own poetry again in his analysis of a novel with verse interludes, Napoleon Symphony (1974). This time, though, there was no trickery; readers knew it was Burgess reviewing Burgess. His short analysis does not explain how the language of the poems functions, but it does name T.S. Eliot, Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins as key influences for the work.

The fictional poet F.X. Enderby remains a core connection between Burgess’s novels and poetry. All the way through the four Enderby novels (published in 1963, 1968, 1974 and 1984), Burgess’s poetry is described as written by the eponymous poet. This raises a question about authorship that has only been tackled in passing by a few critics of Burgess’s poetry, and remains unresolved. In a 2003 article, the French writer and critic Sylvère Monod – who edited a short selection of poems for the journal TREMA in 1980 – points out that Burgess was a poet in his own right, and one with an already long poetic career by 1980. While he admits to initially overlooking the Enderby/Burgess authorship issue, Monod focuses his attention on exploring the Enderby poems simply as plot devices in the novels. However, the discipline and linguistic inventiveness of the poetry suggests it is more than just functional plot-matter. As Kevin Jackson puts it in his foreword to Revolutionary Sonnets (2002), ‘a man who set scant if any store by verses he had composed more than thirty years earlier would hardly have troubled to embed them so prominently’. In a foreword to the essay collection Anthony Burgess and Modernism (2008), David Lodge tackles the identity problem by simply focusing on Enderby as the author. Viewing Enderby as a modernist poet, Lodge compares Enderby to William Empson or Edward Thomas. Lodge and Monod, then, provide some brief commentary on Burgess’s Enderby poems, but do not fully define the relationship between Enderby and Burgess.

Laurette Véza – also writing in TREMA in 1980 – explores how Burgess’s influences are frequently echoed in the Enderby poems. Unlike Monod, Véza seems to separate Burgess from Enderby. She describes Burgess as a formalist poet who loves words, not emotion, praising the word play and clarity of the Enderby poems. In exploring this relationship between allusion and lucidity, she highlights how the Enderby poems seem to verge on parody, deciding that such parody is related to cultural heritage. Véza’s critical appraisal passes comment on the poems in their own right, and not just as plot devices. Usefully, Véza emphasises the difference between the fictional poet Enderby and the actual poet Burgess.

Although they are substantial, the Enderby poems are only part of Burgess’s career as a poet. In the 1970s especially, Burgess’s long-form poetry found large audiences away from the Enderby books. He was at his most productive in this form between 1974 and 1976, although long poems had featured in his novels The Worm and the Ring (1961) and One Hand Clapping (1961). In just two years, Burgess published Moses and Napoleon Symphony, as well as including the long poem ‘Augustine and Pelagius’ in The Clockwork Testament. Then, in 1975, Burgess published another long poem (‘In Memoriam Wystan Hugh Auden KMT’) in the Mark Twain Journal.

To be sure, writing much is no qualification for greatness in itself. And yet, Burgess’s poetry manages to combine sheer volume with linguistic ambition, frequently achieving equal levels of success. Indeed, the current corpus would be an impressive collection for one who had simply focused on being a professional poet. Given that – by the 1970s – Burgess had achieved fame and fortune as a journalist, translator, prolific novelist, visiting lecturer and vociferous literary critic, it is tempting to ask how he managed to produce such varied and voluminous poetry in between everything else. Moreover, longer poetry within Napoleon Symphony, ABBA ABBA, Moses, and – later – Byrne reveals Burgess as a fastidious formalist with a sharp eye for literary tradition and a keenness to exploit the quirks of the English language to the full. His poetry of the 1970s is enormous and enormously ambitious. In his poetry as much as his novels, he is unafraid to play with the words of his literary predecessors. Moreover, following T.S. Eliot especially, Burgess was keen to unite old traditions with modern sensibilities. In this way, the poetry records or extends the multiplicity of styles and traditions he devoured with such delight. No wonder Malcolm Bradbury’s obituary of Burgess described him as a ‘postmodern storehouse’. His poetry – like the rest of his literary and musical endeavours – moves the borders of western traditions. Especially in these more expansive works, Burgess’s regard for poetic tradition is so strong that it is sometimes hard to hear his own voice in among the celebratory echoes of other poets. Yet, the scale of the enterprise, alongside the regard for literary history, offers his readers a unique opportunity to explore nothing less than this.

Revolutionary Sonnets (2002), edited by Kevin Jackson, introduces Burgess’s poetry to the general public via a small selection of previously-published verse, following a brief but extremely helpful introductory essay. This compact edition contains miscellaneous poems and poem fragments as well as extracts from Moses (1976). These are presented alongside translated verse and libretti, including Cyrano de Bergerac (1971 and 1985), Oberon (1985), Carmen (1986), and Oedipus the King (1972). Jackson’s edition does not include any unpublished works from the archives, such as ‘The End of Things’ or ‘An Essay on Censorship’. Nor is there any reference to St. Winefred’s Well. A notable editorial decision in Jackson’s selection is to ‘hand the daunting task of editing The Complete Poems of Anthony Burgess on, with all good wishes to someone who finally has the nerve to tackle it’. He does, though, identify some poets who he believes are influential to Burgess. Eliot, William Empson, and Ezra Pound are found to be likely influences, along with ‘perhaps a jigger or two of Robert Graves’. Jackson’s edition is brisk, entertaining, and shines a light on some notable representative samples while avoiding archival adventures.

The present collection is the first to bring Burgess’s significant poetic works into one volume. However, readers may be surprised to learn that the present edition is technically the fourth attempted collection of Burgess’s poetry. In February 1978, a J.J.W. Wilson contacted Burgess to propose an anthology based on the poems published in The Serpent, Manchester University’s student magazine. This would have included eight poems by Burgess, alongside other poets’ work4, and would have been called Juvenilia. Wilson proposed that he and Burgess share 40% of the fees, with 60% going to the other contributors. The other poets would have been Peter Cadle, Ashley Merlin Cox, and John Allan Wilson (the John A. Wilson who appears in Little Wilson and Big God), all former Manchester University students. In a later letter to Burgess from April 1978, Wilson notes that he has asked Glenda Jackson to write a short introduction, no doubt hoping to boost sales. Signalling Burgess’s evident ambitions to have a reputable publisher commit his work to print, Wilson says he ‘sent a copy of the typescript to Frank Pike of Faber & Faber as you suggested’, who – in a later phone call – said the anthology would probably not see publication. Pike was, of course, correct.

Two years after Wilson’s proposed anthology, a short collection by the French literary journal TREMA (1980) gave a handful of poems exposure to a limited specialist readership. The third, twenty-two years after that, Revolutionary Sonnets (Carcanet, 2002), made good ground in representing the range while acknowledging its incompleteness. The present fourth published collection, then, adds to at least thirty-seven years of Burgess scholarship, including around eighteen years of my own. Despite its long genesis, the present collection remains a work in progress, given that new material is frequently being discovered around the world. It is likely that even more Burgess poems will have been uncovered after Collected Poems is published. Perhaps they will be previously unknown poems, or ‘new’ versions of poems included in the present edition that further help us understand Burgess’s compositional processes. Perhaps another verse novel will appear, or yet another verse play. Editors of Burgess have to be resilient and organised in the face of his sometimes overwhelming posthumous productivity.

In an obituary published in the Independent on Sunday, Malcolm Bradbury called Burgess a ‘postmodern storehouse’. However, Burgess was also a key component of the literary marketplace. His archival papers reveal a professional writer whose poetic ambition was mirrored by his large (and mostly extant) library. His literary criticism was erudite and relevant. That is to say, Burgess’s poetry articulates the multiplicity of traditions, forms, and styles of his time, some of which were arguably pushed forward by his plentiful contributions. Projects such as ‘Belli’s Blasphemous Bible’, Moses, and ‘An Essay on Censorship’ crucially combine respect for traditional forms, epic intention, and linguistic experimentation. More modestly-sized works such as Revolutionary Sonnets and many other individual pieces share this combination, but in an artfully compressed way. Both the shorter and the longer poems speak to his modernist influences. Burgess’s linguistic gifts are equally balanced in a hundred or a hundred thousand words.

The present new and representative collection brings together more than four hundred pieces. One fifth of this work is published here for the first time, including the major poem ‘An Essay on Censorship’ (1989). In addition to that large ‘new’ work is a number of hitherto unpublished sonnets and occasional verses.

Where possible, Collected Poems (including ‘Belli’s Blasphemous Bible’) draws on material that is either archived, or in first edition out-of-print novels. Manuscripts have been sourced from two archives. Roughly sixty percent comes from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The rest comes from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (IABF) in Manchester; this remarkably useful collection has received substantial investment recently, and its catalogue has been made available online. The IABF also has most of Burgess’s own books. These were also inspected, and a few poems were found in inserted notes or on flyleaves. The present book is the first time Burgess manuscript material from the Austin and Manchester archives have been combined into a single substantive poetry collection.

Collected Poems has been an assuredly difficult work to compile. The multitude of manuscripts and published variants – mainly resulting from Burgess’s sometimes revisionist approach to writing poetry – has presented significant editorial challenges. Where possible, the edition has drawn directly on material from the archive collections, and/or from first editions of novels, generally favouring earlier drafts. Sometimes, this has purely been for sanity’s sake. Frequently, the level of difference is only slight, and perhaps results from Burgess typing later versions from memory. For example, the first line of the short poem spoken by Sir Benjamin in The Eve of St Venus (written c. 1951, published 1964) begins ‘Heroes are dead to them’. In Burgess’s Banbury diary (1954), the poem begins ‘Heroes are dead to us’. In this case, the earlier version not only works better as a self-contained stanza, but also seems more generalizable. Complexities concerning which version to use are especially present in the poems that were eventually reused in Byrne (such as ‘The Music of the Spheres’), but which have differing words and punctuation. Here, earlier forms have been used. A multiplicity of these sorts of decisions have been made, and the endnotes provide brief accounts where appropriate.

Collected Poems features a long sequence of bawdy and mainly biblical sonnets from a manuscript titled ‘Belli’s Blasphemous Bible’. Burgess also called this ‘Belli’s Bible for Blasphemers’; there are two main manuscripts of these translations, and both titles are used. (I have opted for the former title, preferring its brevity.) Most of these are translations of the nineteenth-century Roman poet G. G. Belli: five of the sonnets were published in Times Literary Supplement on 23 January 1976 and the complete sequence in ABBA ABBA (1977), a novel about a theoretical meeting between John Keats and Belli. Drafts of these sonnets were handwritten in a 1974 diary, and then worked up into intermediate typewritten drafts. Although the diary shows that Burgess may have translated them in the order that is used in ABBA ABBA, the present edition follows the order of the heavily corrected typescript. This order does not greatly deviate from the sequence as it appeared in ABBA ABBA, but the endnotes provide guidance where there are variations. As Paul Howard notes5 the translation methods Burgess adopted meant that they each existed in numerous versions before their appearance in the Times Literary Supplement and the subsequent novel ABBA ABBA (1977). Given that these translations of Belli’s Romanesco sonnets were built up through layers of redrafts, it follows that the versions used in Collected Poems should be based on the far more developed sonnets that appeared in TLS and ABBA ABBA. The present sequence draws on these original manuscripts.

As well as some slight lexical variations, these intermediate drafts have different titles to those that appeared in ABBA ABBA. A full account of these differences is provided in the endnotes. The manuscript can in many respects be read as proof of Burgess’s growing confidence in his translations, since there seem to be – on the whole – fewer handwritten corrections added as the manuscript sequence develops. Moreover, Burgess seemingly worked out his line indentation system only around halfway through the ‘Bible’. Accordingly, readers will note that the shape of the sonnets visibly changes; it was decided to maintain these non-standard indentations as they help us learn more about Burgess’s poetics of space. Another striking feature of the manuscript transcriptions is that the word-choices show no particular regard for editorial conservatism. Sometimes, the rude language was amplified for the ‘final’ ABBA ABBA version. Conversely, in other places, the lexis is more conservative in the published book. The pen-corrected sequence of drafts also demonstrates that Burgess’s intentions were chiefly auditory. A peculiar example can be seen in the last sonnet in the ABBA ABBA sequence (‘The Last Judgment’). On the last line of this sonnet, ‘Er-phwoo’ – the sound of a candle being blown out – was originally written as ‘Phwoo’, and then corrected by hand. Even wind effects were subject to careful sonic reassessment; as well as a poet, Burgess was a musician.

In addition to the source manuscripts used in this edition, a large number of early handwritten translations of the Belli sonnets are held at the Harry Ransom Center archive in Austin, Texas. Additionally, early drafts can be inspected in the Burgess Foundation archive in Manchester. While many of these fragments seem quite different from the versions that were eventually published in ABBA ABBA, none of them offer a particularly elegant array of words upon the page; there are gaps in the lines and rhymes are often still to be worked out. Many sonnets have indeterminately re-worked words and phrases, and to display them here would not make for smooth reading. Hence, the later drafts were used. The sequence, then, draws on a single set of manuscripts, which presumably formed the basis for ABBA ABBA. Four other completed sonnets that are Burgess originals are included in the sequence, just as they are in ABBA ABBA (‘The Bet’, ‘Two Uses for Ashes’, ‘Privy Matters’ and ‘The orchidaceous catalogue begins’). The previously published versions of these sonnets are substantially the same as the later drafts that are held at the archive in Texas, with one exception. The poem beginning ‘The orchidaceous catalogue begins’ does not go as far as spelling out that the name in question is that of the critic Geoffrey Grigson, whereas the archive version does. The full name is restored in the present version.

There are notable exceptions to the overall sequential logic of the Belli translations. Three previously unpublished sonnets (‘Spaniards’, ‘Work’ and ‘Local Industry’) have simply been added at the end of the ‘Bible’, just before Burgess’s own sonnets from the novel. ‘Local Industry’ was originally included as part of the sequence, and appears at the end of the draft sequence, but wasn’t used in ABBA ABBA. Another two were found elsewhere, but – being bawdy sonnets that reference the trappings of Catholicism – fit in quite naturally. Unlike the other sonnets that Burgess chose to translate, they have a markedly personal tone (‘Work? Me?’), and do not directly tell biblical tales. These fruity sonnets were seemingly not produced as part of the main sequence of translations. Accordingly, it is unclear where they were meant to be placed.

Within the manuscripts used for ‘Belli’s Blasphemous Bible’ is a shorter sequence of works that were seemingly intended to be published for a larger audience, in Playboy magazine. The choice of this magazine is not as surprising as it seems. A year before Burgess started his translations6, an interview with Burgess by C. Robert Jennings appeared in the September 1974 edition of Playboy. Through this, and no doubt through his voracious general reading, Burgess would have been aware that the magazine published contemporaries such as Ian Fleming, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Norman Mailer and – much later – Vladimir Nabokov. The obscene sonnets intended for Playboy may, accordingly, have been intended as a sampler of the current work in progress. In this respect, it would have been comparable with the sequence that was published in Times Literary Supplement, although the poems selected for inclusion in Playboy were completely different. The intended selection was: ‘Joseph the Jew (II)’ ‘All About Eve’; ‘A Reply’; ‘The First Clothes’; ‘The State of Innocence’ and;‘Joseph the Jew (I)’. Ultimately, it is unclear as to why the sequence never saw publication in Playboy, but that Burgess selected works for inclusion demonstrates that he was seeking wider audiences for his translations beyond specialist literary journals.

Burgess’s verse manuscripts were either typewritten or handwritten. Many of his poems and translations (especially the Belli sonnets) are playfully illustrated, which frequently brings fun to otherwise mechanical transcription and inspection work. He seemingly wrote on any available material, including envelopes, matchboxes, scraps of card, foolscap paper, diaries and large, small, or very small notebooks. Later evidence of digital manuscripts exists in the form of printouts (including sections from Byrne and an unfinished opera about Freud); Burgess possessed an IBM personal computer, bought in 1985. The sonnet addressed ‘To Chas’ was sent to the IABF by email, and the sonnet about Agincourt derived from an image of a typescript posted online by a manuscript dealer. Sometimes, drafts appear in multiple places. Much of the work is neatly typed, especially on note-o-gram business communication forms, such as the manuscript of ‘The trouble is, you see, getting there’. The original copies of the note-o-gram sonnets are available at the IABF, and photocopies are held in the Harry Ransom Center. Burgess’s use of paper suggests a predilection for tactility, playfulness, and a creative use of space, which – regrettably – is not always easy to convey in print. Generally speaking, it seems Burgess preferred pen and paper, even though his later works were written in the era of the PC.

Deciding which poems to exclude has followed a general logic which is open to debate and may be found to be faulty. As a guiding principle, texts have been selected which have been unavailable for a long time, either because they were out of print, or because they were previously unpublished. Generally speaking, verses that appear to be deliberately bad (usually in the service of a novel’s plot) have been excluded. However, some texts in this general category are so entertaining, so rounded, or so creative that they are included here. A notable example of this is the long poem ‘Not, of course, that either of us thought’ from One Hand Clapping (1961), which – while reflecting its fictional writer’s sense of camp drama – shows a remarkable understanding of the excesses of the emerging styles of the time. Some texts, while determinedly possessing a poetic quality, are too undeveloped for inclusion and would make for uneven reading. A number of fragments, most especially from the Enderby novels, appear in an unfinished state, with words like ‘plonk’ or ‘something’ used to describe a poet’s mind at work; many of these are not included. It will be noted that Byrne is not included here, and – arguably – it should be. However, as a major work that is still in print, and one that has recently seen new editions, it is excluded. Readers are strongly recommended to read Byrne immediately after Collected Poems. The same goes for Napoleon Symphony. Likewise, with a handful of notable exceptions (mainly from The Complete Enderby), other works currently in print (usually meaning embedded within novels) are not included. A collection of the plays is expected to be published as a separate edition. Accordingly, extracts from dramatic works are not included here. Whether these omissions detract from the book, and whether the general logic of the edition stands up to scrutiny is, of course, for the reader to decide.

It is difficult to provide a neat summary of the many styles, the linguistic inventiveness, the endless formal experimentation and the bewildering expansiveness of Burgess’s poetic subjects. For all that, some readers may accuse Burgess of burning his poetic candle at both ends. Of course, his detractors were already saying that in the 1970s when he was yet to write long works like Napoleon Symphony, Byrne, ‘Augustine and Pelagius’ and the ‘Essay on Censorship’. And yet, Burgess wrote a lot of very good poetry in between other massive literary, film, and journalistic endeavours. In all of his chosen forms – poetry, music and prose – Burgess’s intention remained (mainly) serious, and the scale impressive.

Either way, Burgess’s poetry was a central part of his career as a best-selling novelist, and his verse was performed on screens and stages the world over. His poetry was seen, heard, read and watched – in cinemas and on television – by millions of people. It may be the ultimate irony that the widespread availability of the work may have obscured the fact that Anthony Burgess was, first and last, a poet. He also remains a productive writer. There is still much to surprise and delight new and existing readers. Hopefully, that includes the present work for all its faults.

____________________________________________________

1Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 356.

2They Wrote in English (Milan: Tramontana, 1979), vol. 2, p. 553.

3Ibid.

4 ‘When It is All Over’, ‘Wir Danken Unsrem Führer’, ‘Girl’, ‘To Amaryllis after the Dance’, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, ‘All the ore’ (retitled ‘Jeweller’ by J.J.W. Wilson), ‘ A History’, and ‘The Lowdown on Art’.,

5 Paul Howard, ‘All Right, That’s Not a Literal Translation’: Cribs, Licence and Embellishment in the Burgess Versions of Belli’s Sonetti Romaneschi’, Modern Language Review 108:3, July 2013, pp. 700–20.,

6 See Howard (2013), p. 702.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While collecting the poetry of Anthony Burgess has taken much longer than first anticipated, the experience has provided me with the exceptional opportunities to work with some truly extraordinary people. The sense of responsibility has been enormous, but the sense of collegiality has been much bigger. I am indebted to many people. The first person to support me in this particular pursuit was Liana Burgess, the poet’s widow in the meadow. Through Liana, I met Professor Andrew Biswell, whose exceptional tutelage, knowledge, and incredible patience has been of central importance to the production of this work and its editor. The following staff at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (past and present) provided unequalled motivation and practical assistance both directly and indirectly: Dr Alan Roughley, Will Carr, Anna Edwards, Paula Price, Tina Green, Ian Carrington, and Dr Graham Foster. I have been lucky to benefit from the camaraderie and wisdom of the following Burgessians: Dr Rob Spence, the sadly-missed Dr Alan Shockley, Dr Nuria Belastgui, Yves Buelens, and Dr Jim Clarke. Particular thanks go to Michael Schmidt from Carcanet Press for his quiet and enduring patience. Peter Philpott was an especially careful examiner of both prose and punctuation. Georgina Gibbs helped me begin the end. Dr Katy Beavers provided more help than can be adequately recorded here.