The Burning Wheel

Though Aldous Huxley is primarily remembered for his novels, and to a lesser extent his essays, he began his writing career as a poet.  While a student at Balliol College at Oxford, having been exempted from military service due to extremely poor eyesight, he was involved in several student poetry magazines.  In September 1916 his first book of poetry, "The Burning Wheel", appeared.


The 30 poems of the collection make use of traditional forms: all but the title poem rhyme (“The Burning Wheel” is written in blank verse), all use conventional meters such as iambic pentameter and tetrameter, and eleven are sonnets (nine Petrarchan and two Shakespearean).  The content, too, to a large extent harkens back to earlier models, with frequent reference to Greek mythology and romantic ideals such as those of Keats and Shelley, though often with the ironic commentary that would become a trademark of his later poetry.


Huxley was a great admirer of French symbolist poetry and an avid reader of poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, and Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.  This collection contains poems explicitly inspired by Laforgue and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and his other collections also include several sonnets written in French, as well as his own translations of poems by Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire.