John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-93) was an industrious writer. He
published over fifty books, thousands of essays, and numerous drafts and
fragments survive. He predicted many of the struggles and challenges of
his own and the following century. His most famous book is A Clockwork
Orange (1962), later adapted into a controversial film by Stanley
Kubrick. The linguistic innovations of that novel, the strict formal
devices used to contain them, and its range of themes are all to be
found too in Burgess's poetry, an area of his work where he was at once
most free and most experimental. It is his least exposed and most
complex and eloquent area of achievement, now revealed at last in all
its richness. His flair for words, formal discipline, experimentalism,
and fondness for variousness mark every page.