<b>Andrew Biswell, the <i>Guardian Review</i>, Saturday 25th January 2003<br />
Artifice and insemination<br />
Andrew Biswell on a spunky collection that illuminates the range of Anthony Burgess's interests, <i>Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems</i></b><br />
It should have come as no surprise that <i>Byrne</i>, Anthony Burgess's last novel (published posthumously in 1995), was written entirely in verse. Four of the book's five chapters are composed in ottava rima, a verse-form chosen by Burgess because it was the one that Lord Byron had used in his longer poetic narratives, such as <i>Don Juan</i>. Burgess's previous 31 novels, in which limericks, songs, poetic parodies, verse interludes and poet-characters abound, had done much to prepare readers for the sustained, spermatic, Byronic wit of Byrne:<br />
Byrne's name survives among film-music-makers<br />
Because the late-night shows subsist on trash.<br />
His opera's buried by art's undertakers,<br />
His paintings join his funerary ash.<br />
He left no land. "My property's two achers,"<br />
Stroking laborious ballocks. As for cash,<br />
He lived on women, paying in about<br />
Ten inches. We don't know what they paid out.<br />
The same bawdy, libidinous qualities that are on display here may be found in Burgess's earliest surviving poems, now collected for the first time in book form by Kevin Jackson. One of Burgess's schoolboy poems, "The Music of the Spheres", written in 1934 while he was studying at Xaverian College in Manchester, offers two possible interpretations. The "spheres" of the title could well be the harmony-producing celestial bodies of mythology. Or else they are testicles, in which case the poem must be referring to a coarser, orgasmic kind of music:<br />
I have raised and poised a fiddle<br />
Which, will you lend it ears,<br />
Will utter music's model:<br />
The music of the spheres.<br />
By God, I think not Purcell<br />
Nor Arne could match my airs.<br />
Perfect beyond rehearsal<br />
The music of the spheres.<br />
Burgess returns repeatedly in his poems to the conjoined ideas (as he sees them) of maleness and creativity. Reading through the poems gathered here, I was struck by the number of allusions to the sexual act, often communicated through images of axes, drills, swords and gushing rivers of sperm. Taken together, these amount to an implicit argument about writing itself as a masculine business, which is echoed elsewhere in Burgess's fiction and in his swaggering verse translation of Rostand's <i>Cyrano de Bergerac</i>. Like Cyrano in the play, Burgess used to walk the streets and subways of New York armed with a sword-stick, and this experience fed into another long poem, "The Sword".<br />
Some of Burgess's most inventive sonnets appear in the novella <i>Abba Abba</i> (1977), a book which draws its title from the rhyme-scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet. Burgess imagines a meeting in Rome between the dying John Keats and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863), the blasphemous sonneteer who wrote in the Roman dialect. The second half of the book contains translations of 71 of Belli's sonnets. Reviewing the novella, Tom Paulin said that Burgess "justifies his title, which isn't an example of merely tricksy punning, but an absolutely appropriate naming of his subject". The Belli translations are consistently filthy, but they preserve much of the obscene energy that drives the Roman originals. These lines are from "The Annunciation" (the Angel Gabriel is speaking):<br />
"Ave," he said, and after that, "Maria.<br />
Rejoice because the Lord's eternal love<br />
Has made you pregnant - not by orthodox<br />
Methods, of course. The Pentecostal dove<br />
Came silently and nested in your box."<br />
"A hen?" she blushed. "For I know nothing of -"<br />
The angel nodded, knowing she meant cocks.<br />
Burgess seems to have derived his theory of poetry from Robert Graves's eccentric but (in its day) widely influential critical book, <i>The White Goddess</i> (1948). Graves spoke of poetry as "a wild Pentecostal speaking with tongues", and Burgess writes in one of his own poems that "the Pentecostal sperm came hissing down" at the moment of creative generation. This is how he believed poems got made: by a process of insemination from without, or (as Graves puts it) through "religious invocation of the Muse, the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites".<br />
This theory of poetry is played out most conspicuously in the four comic novels that Burgess wrote about his alter ego, the sociopathic poet Francis Xavier Enderby, who composes most of his best work on the lavatory seat (which he likens to Shakespeare's "wooden O"). Enderby is literally inspired, in the strict sense of having words breathed into him, by a mystical white goddess, his ethereal muse. Within the fictional frame, Burgess's own early poems are reattributed to Enderby, including a sequence of five sonnets (the "Revolutionary Sonnets" of this volume's title) which won the mild approval of TS Eliot, to whom Burgess had sent them in the early 1950s:<br />
A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.<br />
The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch.<br />
The absolute was everybody's pitch,<br />
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name.<br />
That dark aborted any wish to tame<br />
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch<br />
But then was endless growling ocean, rich<br />
In fish and heroes till the dredgers came.<br />
Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock<br />
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires.<br />
A martin's nest clogged the cathedral clock,<br />
But it was morning: birds could not be liars.<br />
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock.<br />
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.<br />
What is revolutionary about this sonnet? Certainly not the approach to form, which is tight and metrically exact. The revolution lies in the subject matter: it is about the convulsive transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation. As the fictional poet explains in <i>Inside Mr Enderby</i> (1963), the "martin's nest" in the sestet stands for Martin Luther and "the beginning of dissolution, everybody beginning to be alone, a common tradition providing no tuning-fork of reference and no way of telling the time, because the common tradition has been dredged away".<br />
Other sonnets address other revolutions, such as the fall of man, the close of the Augustan age and the beginning of the romantic revival. Burgess's addiction to the sonnet form proclaims that the 1930s are his poetic point of origin, and the concerns of this sequence correspond closely to WH Auden's historical musings in his 1938 <i>Chinese sonnets</i> (first published in <i>Journey to a War</i>), which Burgess had read when he was an undergraduate.<br />
Jackson's selection of Burgess's poems, including some ephemeral work culled from newspapers and magazines, is illuminatingly footnoted, and the editor has taken care to give the texts in their earliest surviving versions. Yet a surprisingly large number of Burgess's poems are simply missing from this book: the verse interludes from <i>The Worm and the Ring</i>, "A Long Trip to Tea-Time" and "One Hand Clapping"; the long poems and acrostics from <i>Napoleon Symphony</i>; the "Elegy for X" from <i>Hockney's Alphabet</i>; the songs from <i>A Long Trip to Tea-Time</i> and from the Broadway musical, <i>Cyrano</i>.<br />
The most disappointing omission is "An Essay on Censorship", Burgess's long verse-letter to Salman Rushdie (written immediately after the 1989 fatwa), a spirited imitation of Alexander Pope's <i>Essay on Man</i>. Can Jackson be persuaded to add it to a second edition, or must we wait for a fuller, more scholarly volume of <i>Collected Poems</i>?

<b>Michael Glover, the <i>Financial Times</i>, Saturday 14th December 2002</b><br />
...It is all the more refreshing then to read a small selection from Burgess' undervalued poetry - an edition of his collected poems would surely run to several hundred pages - including extracts from some of his libretti and works for the stage. Burgess was diffident about the merits of his poetry, but some of his work - and especially his translations from the 19th century Roman dialect poet Giuseppi Belli, are robustly scatological, funny and first-rate. As in his prose, Burgess always tends to make rapid and unpredictable shifts from the learned to the demotic (his hero, James Joyce, did the same) - and so it is refreshing to read him writing in both the style of American musical comedy and that of the gnomic William Empson. It demonstrates the great range and versatility of his talents.