Collected Poems by Anthony Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) 📕

ultimate irony that the widespread availability of the work may have obscured the fact that Anthony Burgess was, first and last, a poet. He also remains a productive writer. There is still much to surprise and delight new and existing readers. Hopefully, that includes the present work for all its faults.

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1 Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 356.

2 They Wrote in English (Milan: Tramontana, 1979), vol. 2, p. 553.

3 Ibid.

4 ‘When It is All Over’, ‘Wir Danken Unsrem Führer’, ‘Girl’, ‘To Amaryllis after the Dance’, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, ‘All the ore’ (retitled ‘Jeweller’ by J.J.W. Wilson), ‘ A History’, and ‘The Lowdown on Art’.,

5 Paul Howard, ‘All Right, That’s Not a Literal Translation’: Cribs, Licence and Embellishment in the Burgess Versions of Belli’s Sonetti Romaneschi’, Modern Language Review 108:3, July 2013, pp. 700–20.,

6 See Howard (2013), p. 702.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While collecting the poetry of Anthony Burgess has taken much longer than first anticipated, the experience has provided me with the exceptional opportunities to work with some truly extraordinary people. The sense of responsibility has been enormous, but the sense of collegiality has been much bigger. I am indebted to many people. The first person to support me in this particular pursuit was Liana Burgess, the poet’s widow in the meadow. Through Liana, I met Professor Andrew Biswell, whose exceptional tutelage, knowledge, and incredible patience has been of central importance to the production of this work and its editor. The following staff at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation (past and present) provided unequalled motivation and practical assistance both directly and indirectly: Dr Alan Roughley, Will Carr, Anna Edwards, Paula Price, Tina Green, Ian Carrington, and Dr Graham Foster. I have been lucky to benefit from the camaraderie and wisdom of the following Burgessians: Dr Rob Spence, the sadly-missed Dr Alan Shockley, Dr Nuria Belastgui, Yves Buelens, and Dr Jim Clarke. Particular thanks go to Michael Schmidt from Carcanet Press for his quiet and enduring patience. Peter Philpott was an especially careful examiner of both prose and punctuation. Georgina Gibbs helped me begin the end. Dr Katy Beavers provided more help than can be adequately recorded here.

LONGER POEMS, SEQUENCES, AND NARRATIVE WORKS

AN ESSAY ON CENSORSHIP

A book is perilous, a book can slay:

This is the text we ponder on today,

Hence sing the Censor, though our preference is

To swing the censer at his obsequies,

The Censor, whose twin tasks, when Rome held sway,

Were to count citizens, then make them pay,

But now whose proper function is defined

As preying not on money but on mind.

Suppression is the word: it operates

When free intelligence communicates

With free intelligence to clarify

The nature of this life beneath the sky,

Even beyond it. Image, verse or prose,

The actor’s rhetoric or nudist’s pose,

The painter’s brush-strokes or the camera’s clicks,

Whether the field be faith or politics,

The social ambit or the amorous life,

The Censor’s poised, with napalm or with knife,

Communicate with structure and in stone,

As does the architect; or else intone

A complex symphony or artless tune,

And then your skill’s theoretically immune,

Unless you were a son of Israel

In the bad German time or, sad to tell,

Your name was Wagner in the Jewish state,

Though briefly. Humanly communicate

Then fear inhuman seekers to suppress.

To freedom’s partisans this breeds distress,

Though the degree of it depends upon

The status of the functionaries who don

The censor’s robes. When small, they underline

The squirm of the parochial philistine;

When large, we shudder with proleptic fright

At a new threat to an old human right.

Authors, who eat and drink what they create,

See the prescriptions of a foreign state

As a mere aspect of a threat diffused

Wherever the free-winging word is used.

A book’s unpublished lest it may offend;

Published, its tenuous life is at an end

While libel seems to mutter. Books are burned

By activists whose muftis have not learned

The truth of Heine’s aphorism: ‘Who

Burns books will soon burn human beings too.’

Proscription can be dangerously bizarre.

In Malta, students of the scalpel are

Denied obstetric primers, for within

Are pictures that inflame and lead to sin.

As for the Marxist bloc – despite glasnost,

Bourgeois morality must not be crossed

And the whole social structure is so frail

It trembles at a breath as at a gale.

For long, in Britain, censorship has worked

In regions where the dark erotic lurked.

The genitalia, and what they do,

Or have done to them, were pronounced taboo.

No quadrilateral descriptive of

The motions of purgation or of love

Could be allowed. The foul expletive and

The fair descriptive equally were banned.

Obscene – the very word was like a sneer,

Semantically null, a sneeze of fear,

A spurt of shock confronting what was known,

Though glossed as monstrous, in a privy zone.

What decency pronounced should be concealed

Was with a frightful candour all revealed.

Strange that our Western culture should proclaim:

What grants most pleasure also grants most shame.

But the anomaly, the joy-bred guilt

Is, when you think of it, already built

Into our sad condition, for the source

Of ecstasy is also bestial, coarse,

A lowly instrument of base discharge.

Again, note, the disparity is large

Between the exaltations that we bless

And the base agent’s total ugliness.

The foul familiar must be rendered strange

– The lingam and the yoni, the whole range

Of Sigmund’s symbols before we can start

Accepting sex as matter for high art.

Ulysses and The Rainbow, Lady C.

Primed act of privy criminality,

Because of shame wrapped in what should exalt.

As for The Well of Loneliness, its fault

Lay in its sex invisible but perverse.

Love – bad enough; love between women – worse.

To declare smugly: ‘Look, the battle’s done’

Is always perilous. Wars are never won.

A truce looks like a peace. It would appear,

However, that what book is published here

Will not be banned for its erotic theme.

True, Kirkup’s poem on a soldier’s dream,

A gay centurion eyeing the Crucified

As fodder for his gaiety, was denied

The right of print, the poet punished too,

But blasphemy has always been taboo.

A whole new generation flourishes

That does not know what a book-censor is

Except as history dead and buried. Still,

Obscenity is not nor ever will

Be an archaic word. The candid show

Of love, whether heterosexual or no,

Remains a most disputable terrain,

For there is more to sex than Lady Jane,

John Thomas, Boylan, Molly Bloom, et al.

Plain eroticism soon