Collected Poems

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.



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.