The Burning Wheel

By Aldous Huxley and Mint Editions

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 remark: “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.

This edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Burning Wheel is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mint Editions
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781513284606

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.

Book preview

THE BURNING WHEEL

Wearied of its own turning,

Distressed with its own busy restlessness,

Yearning to draw the circumferent pain—

The rim that is dizzy with speed—

To the motionless centre, there to rest,

The wheel must strain through agony

On agony contracting, returning

Into the core of steel.

And at last the wheel has rest, is still,

Shrunk to an adamant core:

Fulfilling its will in fixity.

But the yearning atoms, as they grind

Closer and closer, more and more

Fiercely together, beget

A flaming fire upward leaping,

Billowing out in a burning,

Passionate, fierce desire to find

The infinite calm of the mother’s breast.

And there the flame is a Christ-child sleeping,

Bright, tenderly radiant;

All bitterness lost in the infinite

Peace of the mother’s bosom.

But death comes creeping in a tide

Of slow oblivion, till the flame in fear

Wakes from the sleep of its quiet brightness

And burns with a darkening passion and pain,

Lest, all forgetting in quiet, it perish.

And as it burns and anguishes it quickens,

Begetting once again the wheel that yearns—

Sick with its speed—for the terrible stillness

Of the adamant core and the steel-hard chain.

And so once more

Shall the wheel revolve till its anguish cease

In the iron anguish of fixity;

Till once again

Flame billows out to infinity,

Sinking to a sleep of brightness

In that vast oblivious peace.

DOORS OF THE TEMPLE

Many are the doors of the spirit that lead

Into the inmost shrine:

And I count the gates of the temple