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.

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) was a novelist, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator, and critic. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, he wrote more than sixty books of fiction, non-fiction, and autobiography, as well as classical music, plays, film scripts, essays, and articles. Burgess was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side. He was educated at Xaverian College and Manchester University. He lived in Malaya, Malta, Monaco, Italy, and the United States, and his books are still widely read all over the world. Jonathan Mann is editor of the Collected Poems of Anthony Burgess (Carcanet, 2020). He is a teacher, editor, researcher, poet, and musician. Jonathan’s research on Burgess has been published in the following books: Anthony Burgess and France (2017); Marlowe, Shakespeare, Burgess. Anthony Burgess and his Elizabethan Affiliations (2012); and Anthony Burgess: Music in Literature and Literature in Music (2009). He is also co-founder/co-editor of the Journal of Impact Cultures. Jonathan is a curator of poetry through the Capital Letters live poetry series.