novel. Movies and plays replaced dramatic poems. Lyricalpoetry remained as the only real expression of poetry, to the author. But theway Burgess talks about poetry passes the idea that this branch of literatureis so moribund to the point that he even foresees a future without poetry. Forme, thats not real. There are a great amount of good poets nowadays and agreat deal of people who admire their work. It is also possible to say that thework of many poets of the past is being read and admired for centuries. Poetryis alive and it will never die: as long as men exist, poetry will never ceaseto be produced and consumed. Burgess tells us that his book will deal with drama, novel and poetry producedin English, inside the British Isles. Hestarts his journey explaining that English literature is strongly influenced bythe geography and the climate of England. He affirms that Englishliterature reflects the awareness of the English society concerning the fourseasons of the year. The peculiar climate of England and its geography produceda conservative people, but it didnt prevented the raising of rebels andeccentrics (p. 12) like Shelley, Byron and Blake. In the contrary: preciselybecause of that conservativeness they became rebels. Burgess describes the English as a society which loves justice, but hates lawsand, partly because of that, seems to be a mad society. The hatred for laws isreflected on literature when we see that English writers dont like to followrules and, sometimes, even dare to create new words to fulfill their purposes. Yet,talking about English literature requires a deep knowledge of the EnglishLanguage and because of that, Burgess tells us about the historical phases ofEnglish. Old Englishseems to be a totally different language when compared to Modern English, butthey two are English itself. Burgess makes it clear that he will provide thereader with the knowledge of what kind of literature was produced in OldEnglish and that his main concern is Modern English literature (despite thatwarning, he brings to us a very rich material dealing with Old Englishliterature). According to the author, Modern Englishstarts when poetry and prose become more understandable, more recognizable asEnglish as we know it nowadays. However, before that, there was a phase oftransition (p. 13) in which language starts to move forward the English wespeak: this phase was Middle English. Burgesshighlights that language changes in two dimensions, time and space, and thatswhy different variations of English lived together during Middle English, sometotally foreign to us and others already somewhat modern. That variation inspace is responsible for the different kinds of English spoken in England, forexample, the different dialects. Some of these dialects are established as themore important at a certain moment. In England, the more important dialectis the StandardEnglish, orKings, or Queens English. Itsinteresting to notice that the establishment of a standard dialect is somethingmodern. During Middle English all dialects lived together and literature wasproduced in all of them. Anthony Burgess presents us an overview on English literature and startstalking about the Angles and the Saxons, peoples which migrated from the northof Europe escaping from what he calls barbarous and