Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems

"Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems" explores themes of violence and love, pretensions and emotion, sex and war and is both sobering and funny.

Redesigned and reissued in 2017 to celebrate the 'Burgess Centenary' - 100 years of Anthony Burgess Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems captures the full range and achievement of Anthony Burgess's poetry and verse. It is as daring, original and inventive as the name suggests. The work explores themes of violence and love, pretensions and emotion, sex and war and is both sobering, and hysterically funny. The author of major novels, essays and reviews, the lecturer whose dazzling take on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land changed our reading of the poem, is - like Eliot himself - a prosodic genius and a musical aficionado. Here are extracts from Burgess’s translations of the librettos of Carmen, Oberon and others; of verse dramas including Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, Chatsky; and his original musicals Trotsky’s in New York!, Mozart and the Wolf Gang and A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music among others. Here too are his wonderful translations of the Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Belli, extracts from his verse epic Moses, the complete poems of F. X. Enderby, occasional poems for Vladimir Nabokov and Ogden Nash... And we encounter the poems of young John Burgess Wilson, from the Manchester student journal The Serpent. Add to this the autobiographical poem ‘The Sword’, his New York Times verses about the Apollo II moon landing, a verse fragment from his abandoned novel It is the Miller’s Daughter - his fans and new readers will be left with a sense of the scale, wit and accomplishment of one of the great creative originals of the twentieth century.