Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

Written by Aldous Huxley

Narrated by LibriVox Community

Though later known for his essays and novels, Aldous Huxley started his writing career as a poet. Published in 1918, The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third compilation of poetry.

The volume begins with "The Defeat of Youth", a sequence of twenty-two sonnets that explores irreconcilability of the ideal and the disappointing reality. Jerome Meckier called it “the century’s most successful sonnet sequence, better than Auden’s or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s.” In the rest of the volume, Huxley continues to explore themes started in The Burning Wheel, his first volume of poetry, including vision, blindness, and other contrasts.

The volume concludes with two English translations by Huxley of two French poems: Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune" and Arthur Rimbaud’s (1871) poem “Les Chercheuses de poux,” translated as “The Louse Hunters.” Summary by Mary Kay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a prominent and successful English writer. Throughout his career he wrote over fifty books, and was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Huxley wrote his first book, Crome Yellow, when he was seventeen years old, which was described by critics as a complex social satire. Huxley was both an avid humanist and pacifist and many of these ideals are reflected in his writing. Often controversial, Huxley’s views were most evident in the best-selling dystopian novel, Brave New World. The publication of Brave New Worldin 1931 rattled many who read it. However, the novel inspired many writers, Kurt Vonnegut in particular, to describe the book’s characters as foundational to the genre of science fiction. With much of his work attempting to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western beliefs, Aldous Huxley has been hailed as a writer ahead of his time.