He may have been a brilliant novelist and essayist, but the writer’s newly published poetry collection is, to put it politely, ‘not terribly good’

Name: George Orwell.

Age: Born 1903; died 1950; image stuck in about 1984.

Appearance: Down-at-heel poet.

Occupation: Down-at-heel poet.

Look, I may not know much about 20th-century literature, but I do know Orwell was not a poet. He wrote essays and novels, and in Animal Farm and 1984 produced … Yes, we all know that. No need to trot out what you remember from GCSE English. But he also wrote poetry all his life, and his collected verse is about to be published.

I think you must have the wrong man. Perhaps you’re thinking of Stephen Spender. “Summer-like for an instant the autumn sun bursts out, / And the light through the turning elms is green and clear; / It slants down the path and ragged marigolds glow / Fiery again, last flames of the dying year.”

Spender? Orwell.

So why have we never been aware of his poetry before? Because it’s not terribly good, and his estate has been wary of allowing a collection to appear. “If you tried to present this purely as poetry, you’d get shot down,” says Bill Hamilton, his literary executor.

So how is it being published? The Orwell Society has hit on the clever wheeze of prefacing each of the 40 or so poems that have survived with short biographical prefaces telling you where he was when he wrote it and what his mood was. His estate was still resisting selling it to the general public but, under pressure from booksellers, has now caved in.

Is the poetry really so bad? “Orwell wasn’t a wonderful poet,” admits Dione Venables, who edited the collection, “but in his poetry he’s gloomy, he’s funny, he’s happy, he’s sad, and in the last things he wrote, you feel his pain.”

Sounds terrible. The early patriotic poems written while he was at Eton are embarrassing, and he could never quite decide whether he was an old-fashioned poet like Walter de la Mare or a modernist like TS Eliot, but Romance (1925) is very funny and A Little Poem (1935) has its moments.

Not to be confused with: Verses in Christmas cards.

Do say: “I see the initial print run is only 500 copies. I think I’ll invest in a first edition.”

Don’t say: “Too late – Amazon are already out of stock.”