What do you think?
Rate this book
Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems
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 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.
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 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.
- GenresPoetry
130 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
Anthony Burgess
360 books4,328 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 28, 2015
a good overview of / introduction to Burgess's poetic abilities and how pervasive his search for song has been throughout his body of work
Displaying 1 of 1 review