‘Don’t read Clockwork Orange – it’s a foul farrago,’ wrote Burgess

The great novelist saw himself as a poet, and newly found stanzas show him berating his own bestseller in verse

Previously unpublished love poems written by Anthony Burgess to each of his two wives have been discovered, along with a verse in which he dismissed A Clockwork Orange, the savage satire for which he is best known, as “a foul farrago”, urging people to read Shakespeare and Shelley instead.

They are among dozens of unknown poems that have been found, the majority in his vast archive held by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, an educational charity in Manchester, where the writer was born in 1917.

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