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 Jackson’s edition does not include any unpublished works from the archives, such as ‘The End of Things’ or ‘An Essay on Censorship’.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
