The Burning Wheel

by Aldous Huxley

The Burning Wheel (1916) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. Published when the poet was only twenty-two, The Burning Wheel captures the mind of an artist at its earliest fertile stage, enthralled with a world either blooming with change or wilting with all-out war. Although Huxley is known foremost as a novelist, his poetry exhibits a mastery of language and an uncommon sense of the music inherent to words.

“The Burning Wheel” opens the collection with a kaleidoscopic vision of life and creation, illuminating the poet’s debt to the French Symbolists. “Weary of its own turning,” the burning wheel slows for a moment’s rest. This wheel, both machine and pure, wild flame, is the poet compelled to create, the mind that “[w]akes from the sleep of its quiet brightness / And burns with a darkening passion and pain.” In “Quotidian Vision,” Huxley returns to earth to “There is a sadness in the street / And sullenly the folk I meet / Droop their heads as they walk along.” In these simple, rhyming couplets, the poet channels the verse and vision of William Blake to see, despite the “mist of cold and muffling grey,” a “dead world move for him once more / With beauty for its living core.” The Burning Wheel is a compelling collection from an artist whose poetry is no less remarkable for having gone mostly unnoticed.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Burning Wheel is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Genres: Poetry

43 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1916

About the author

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

Reviews

[Steven Walle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great poem.

[Aether Real · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are a really interesting set of poems. Definitely an author one should own all of his works. Such an interesting person.

[Bettie]

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47912

CONTENTS.

The Burning Wheel
Doors of the Temple
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Darkness
Mole
The Two Seasons
Two Realities
Quotidian Vision
Vision
The Mirror
Variations on a Theme of Laforgue
Philosophy
Philoclea in the Forest
Books and Thoughts
Contrary to Nature and Aristotle
Escape
The Garden
The Canal
The Ideal found wanting
Misplaced Love
Sonnet
Sentimental Summer
The Choice
The Higher Sensualism
Sonnet
Formal Verses
Perils of the Small Hours
Complaint
Return to an Old Home
Fragment
The Walk

[#DÏ4B7Ø Chinnamasta-Bhairav · Rating 3 out of 5]

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To SEE a WORLD in a Grain of Sand,
And a HEAVEN in a Wild Flower,
Hold INFINITY in the palm of your hand
And ETERNITY in an Hour"
~ William Blake ~

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Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is form.
Form is not different than Emptiness;
Emptiness is not different than form
~ Heart Sutra ~

Like the ocean and its waves,
inseparable yet distinct

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" I and The Father are one,
I am The Truth,
The Life and The Path.”

Like a river flowing from its source,
connected and continuous

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Thy kingdom come.
Let the reign of divine
Truth, Life, and Love
be established in me,
and rule out of me all sin;
and may Thy Word
enrich the affections of all mankind

A mighty oak tree standing firm against the storm,
As sunlight scatters the shadows of night
A river nourishing the land it flows through

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[5t4n5 Dot Com · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aldous started out writing as a poet and this is his first ever book.

While there were a couple of poems in this that i could get my head around, for the most part it was all a bit too much above my 21st century head: mostly not my kind of poetry.   I would class Aldous' early poetry as very much ringing the death knell of the Victorian upper classes.

For those of us who have been enamoured by Aldous' later writing, it's quite interesting to come back to the very beginning and do Aldous chronologically.

Final thoughts: not my cup of tea but you might enjoy it if you're into pretentious poetry with lots of words that you have to look up.

[Juan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Difficult

I really enjoy reading anything by Aldous Huxley. I found this to be laborious rather then entertaining. It was some of his first work, and in different Era. Which is why I didn’t get as interested.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It requires a certain mood to appreciate it, I think. Fortunately, I was in such a mood.

[Laura]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.