Collected Poems

– ‘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