Burgess was neither a very good nor a particularly bad poet, but he did work hard at his verse over many decades, and that fact resulted in some notable moments. It's an interesting question as to why he persevered so assiduously. Part of it, I daresay, was his pleasure in the challenge, and his satisfaction in his ability to meet that challenge. No shame in that, and if it results in writing that is the very definition of 'workmanlike' I certainly don't mean the word in a condescending sense. Though Enderby, under whose name AB passed off a good proportion of his own work, claimed 'I stand for form and denseness, the seventeenth-century tradition modified' Burgess's own skill was in more fluid, playful and punful (we could say: 'poems, punny each') work, in lighter verse, libretti and the like. The two idioms might appear to have something important in common, namely 'wit'; but it strikes me that wit points in quite different directions in these two cases. Not exactly mapping onto this is the sense that Burgess, like Wordsworth, was capable of both writing well and writing badly without, it seems, himself being able to tell those two modes apart. If I start with the Bad, it is only because I prefer to finish with the Good.
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Kevin Jackson's 2002 selection of Burgess for Carcanet's 'Poetry Pléiade' series provokes such questions. It's a slim volume (barely squeaking past 100 pages) that aims to gives us tasters from the whole of Burgess's life, from his earliest published work through to stuff written in his last decade, rather than more substantial samples. As a result it sometimes feels indicative rather than exemplary. Andrew Biswell's Guardian review of the volume noted some of the 'surprisingly large number of Burgess's poems' not included here, including 'the verse interludes from The Worm and the Ring, 'A Long Trip to Tea-Time' and 'One Hand Clapping'; the long poems and acrostics from Napoleon Symphony; the 'Elegy for X' from Hockney's Alphabet; the songs from A Long Trip to Tea-Time and from the Broadway musical, Cyrano' (although actually Jackson does include material from that latter). Biswell goes on:
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 Essay on Man. Can Jackson be persuaded to add it to a second edition, or must we wait for a fuller, more scholarly volume of Collected Poems?In his intro Jackson, a touch pompously, 'hands the daunting task of editing The Complete Poems of Anthony Burgess on, with all good wishes, to the as yet unborn scholar of the twenty-second or twenty-third century' [xv]. This volume is more by way of an act of homage (there's a touching 'personal note' at the end of the preface that portrays the Burgess Jackson knew in real life, meeting him several times, as a fundamentally kind, decent, rather shy individual) and that's fine; although there are signs of haste too. I don't just mean in the scantiness of the selection, but on the level of typo ('.Enderby', viii) and argument: 'until this publication of Revolutionary Sonnets and other poems,' Jackson claims, 'only one of those threescore books listed on Burgess's increasingly crowded "By the same author" pages was ever offered to the world as "verse"' [vii]. He means Moses (a work 'which found few readers and fewer advocates'); but this ignores Byrne, an omission made more puzzling by the fact that on the very next page Jackson talks about Byrne in glowing terms. Not to worry: Jackson's annotation to the poems themselves is helpful and his headnotes to each poem often excellent.
Revolutionary Sonnets is divided into four sections. The first collects most of the 'F. X. Enderby' poetry under the same title that Wilson first published five of them (as by 'John Burgess Wilson' or 'JBW') in the Transatlantic Review in 1966: 'Revolutionary Sonnets'. Since the poems themselves are by no means revolutionary in terms of form or address, the title presumably refers to their thematic interest in the linked revolutions of the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther is demoted to a squawking bird: 'a martin's nest clogging the cathedral clock' [3]) and the Romantic creation of a new poetry of affective subjectivity and transcendence. Burgess-as-Enderby, Catholic and metaphysical-manqué, resists both revolvings, and perhaps it is this reactionary quality that explains why I bounce so hard off his poetry in this mode. Or perhaps the problem is that I, as reader, lack access to the objective correlative to which Burgess adverts. Because not only do I own this lack, I don't agree with Eliot that 'objective correlative' is a true or useful description of pre-Romantic verse. I've fretted over some of these poems on this blog before, when they appeared in the livery of Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, and don't propose to spend too much time going over it all again here.
Put it this way: re-reading these poems led me to the judgment expressed in the first line of this blogpost. Some of these poems are interesting and some of the lines are eloquent ('Prudence, prudence, the pigeons call' and 'Summer 1940' aren't bad poems). Most are blotted with awkward or unconvincing moments, as if Burgess's fascination with multi-layered Empsonian semantics simply distracted him from the control of tone that is so central to poetic effectiveness. 'To Tirzah' is two stanzas, the first mock-heroic ('you being the gate/where the army went through,/would you renew/The triumph?') the second deliberately downbeat and quotidian. But the latter strikes a clumsy and bathetic note, banalising its point:
But some morning when you are washing upIf that last line is aiming for insouciance or stylish offhandness it fails, and trips itself into mere E J Thribbishness, something for which the ground is prepared by the ill-judged 'a lot' or the wrenchingly Stuffed Owl enjambment of 'cup/Of tea'. Burgess certainly loves his internal rhymes, but here he overdoes it ('tea possiblee you will see fiddlededee'). The Enderby poems are full of stuff like this. Also of wincing archaisms: the line 'Augustus on a guinea sate in state' sacrifices the validity of 'sat' to its cod-eighteenth-century archness of 'sate' for the sake, again, of the internal rhyme. Later in that same sonnet we're told the
Or some afternoon, making a cup
Of tea, possibly you will see
The heavens opening and a lot
Of saints singing with bells ringing.
But then again, possibly not. [9]
pillars nodded, melted, and were seen... which doubles down on the bizarreness of architectural supports nodding (flexing which part of their neck, exactly?) with the mixed-metaphor of a goddess sitting on something as insubstantial as a shadow. Is it supposed to be the shadow of a goddess sat on the shadow of the pillar? In which case how can you tell a goddess by her shadow? Or is it an actual goddess sat on a shadow pillar? How would that work? Or is the goddess sitting in a chair or throne and the shadows are a separate element? Confused!
As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat. [5]
Of course, much of this early verse is, precisely, early verse, with the ill-judgement characteristic of juvenilia, a fondness for archaic elevations of tone ('As when thou first didst bring that art of heat/To nations bestial still and barbarous' [21]), clunky inversions ('But lest with so much weight the streets should rock,' [30]) and gestures in the direction of profundity that never rise above portentousness and, indeed, pretentiousness:
What we made out of lightDeep, man.
The light would not have.
So we hollowed out a grave
Where light has forever set. [24]
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Still: it's bad manners to mock a writer's juvenilia. And the larger point is: I very much enjoyed reading the non-Enderby poems included in here, especially: (a) most of the shorter pieces in Part 1; (b) the 'Longer Poems' of Part 2, especially the neoPopian verse epistle in heroic couplets called 'O Lord, O Ford, God Help Us, Also You: A New Year's Message for 1975' originally published in the New York Times Magazine (the titular Ford is Gerald, who had taken over from Watergate-disgraced resignee Nixon); (c) Part 3's Translations and Adaptations' (specifically a bit of the Pervigilium Veneris from The Eve of Saint Venus, and a bunch of Belli's sonnets from ABBA ABBA); and, finally (d) Part 4's varied selection of 'Dramatic Verse, Libretti and Lyrics for Musicals'.
To take these in reverse order. Burgess's work as a librettist shows how skilled he was at this work: ingenious and inventive, able to blend expression to rhythmic structures deftly and effectively (technically much harder to do than people sometimes think, this). I wonder if the thing that prevented these lyrics and libretti from making a larger impact, culturally, is that Burgess is too clever for the medium. Two examples: first, from his version of Weber's Oberon. A mermaid is singing:
Now and then I can see up aloftThis, I'd say, is really sprightly, well-written verse; although as a song lyric it lacks the directness, and therefore the immeasurably greater cultural penetration, of 'Darlin it's better/Down where it's wetter/Take it from me ....' Or this, from Burgess's musical version of Ulysses, in which medical students complain that 'too many babies are born/A fertile womb is a thing of gloom/Soon there won't be standing room':
A small flying fish with a buzzing so soft
The stars themselves in their meadow, ignoring its flight,
Find themselves swallowed in mouthfuls of light.
But when day's octopus blazes with red
I plunge to the depths and go sweetly to bed.
Clods and scrods, all alive alive oh,
Life's dripping wet in the watery waters below. [71]
Copulation without populationThis is fine, but lacks both the satirical force and the sheer funnies of Python's later 'Every Sperm is Sacred' song.
Is the thing we all desire.
May God preserve the condom,
The pessary too, of course. [77]
Burgess' best poems were his occasional pieces. One of the very finest is this brief but plangent lyric, in which word-play, pared down to letter-play, pierces the carapace of mere pseudo-Metaphysical 'wit' and touches something mysteriously rather moving:
Our Norman bettersThe aforementioned 'O Lord, O Ford, God Help Us, Also You' is a splendidly dyspeptic grumble about the world of the mid-70s going to hell in a handbasket, mostly because of the corruption of politics: 'politics [which] was metaphysics, art,/Eloquence, knowledge of the human heart' is now 'sunk into a disrepute/Shameful and shameless' [38]. I wonder if its original American readers might have been puzzled by the poem's tendency to divert its ire from Nixon et al to the ongoing miner's strike in the UK ('the blackmail of the unions!' Burgess blusters, 'some great/Cryptoconspiracy all bloody red/That loves to strike and striking strikes us dead!' [40]). And we, with hindsight, may doubt that any personal inconvenience experienced by Maltese-resident Burgess informed the line 'So England shivers and the coal's undug'. Still, the best part of this poem is the weird turn it takes at its end into Jeremiad prophesy of impending cannibalism, that's cannibalism, in the Western world:
Taught English letters
To bathe in the fresh
Warm springs of the south.
So turn your backs on
Anglo-Saxon;
The þ in the flesh,
The æ in the mouth
As you believe that men have reached the moon,The sarcasm! It burns! Burgess wasn't the only person in the 70s to think overpopulation would bring disaster ('fresh millions added every year/To swell the hordes of those ordained to starve') and, accordingly, not the only person from that generation to look a bit scaremongery-foolish, in hindsight. Nonetheless, there's something gnarly and splendid in that last line.
Believe that anthropophagy will soon
Solve all our problems, justifying war,
Since here's a noble cause to wage it for.
The fighting young, the flower of every land,
Will fall in battle and will then be canned.
Try this, the supermarkets will proclaim:
Munch MANCH or MONCH or MENSCH, or some such name. [41]
Other highlights include Burgess's genuinely funny preface to Ogden Nash's Candy is Dandy, written in pastiche Nashese and a two-page poem called 'The Sword' retelling a story from his time in New York when Burgess was locked out of the flat he was staying in , and stomped around the city leaning his claudicated bad leg on his swordstick/walking-stick, which is both precisely observed and well versified, and also does interesting things with a complex key-in-the-lock, sword-in-the-sheath, penis-in-the-vagina thematic perhaps descends distantly from Byron's 'the sword outwears the sheath, the soul outwears the breast'. There's also an 8-line lyric from Burgess's unfinished novel It Is The Miller's Daughter:
Love water, love it with all your being,A slightly different version of this lyric was, as Jackson notes, published in You've Had Your Time:
But only from the well or the picnic spring.
Tasteless, but grateful in summer, embracing the hollow
Of any vessel. But never never follow
Water to the river or sea. Nor ever call
Master or Mistress Water in the bacchanal
Of public waters stirred up by the rough
Wind's rhetoric. Water from the well is enough. [31]
Love water, love it with all your being,Actually that amounts to a different poem. It's supposed to have been written by a French poet 'Albert Ritaine'. If that name is a joke then I can't fathom it; but I like to imagine the original went something like this:
But only from the tap, never the spring.
Tasteless, but grateful in summer, embracing the hollow
Of any vessel. But never never call
On Master or Mistress Water in the fall
Of rivers or the sea churned by the rough
Winds' enmity. Water from the tap is enough. [31]
Aimez-vous de l'eau, avec tout votre coeur,
Mais seulement à partir des puits de pique-nique.
Insipide, mais reconnaissant en été, embrassant le creux
De tout navire. Mais jamais ne jamais suivre
L'eau à la rivière ou la mer. Ni jamais appeler
Maître ou Maîtresse eau dans la bacchanale
Des eaux publiques suscitée par l'état brut
La rhétorique de Vent. L'eau du puits suffit.
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