The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
By Aldous Huxley and Mint Editions
()
About this ebook
The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918) is a collection of poems by English author Aldous Huxley. 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 Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is his third poetry collection.
“The Defeat of Youth” is a moving sonnet sequence on the passage of innocence to experience, on familiar transformation of love into lust. Capturing the experience of youthful attraction, Huxley imagines the moment in which the beloved “leans, and there is laughter in the face / She turns toward him; and it seems a door / Suddenly opened on some desolate place / With a burst of light and music.” As the young man awakens to the life of another, his vision turns tragically pure, molding an image of “immanence divine,” a face “in a flash of laughter” and a “young body with an inward flame.” As the poem unfolds, however, he feels only shame to have touched “things deadly to be desired.” Throughout this collection, Huxley explores the poet’s tendency to sing and to praise the world’s fleeting beauty while “[o]ther young men have been battling with the days / And others have been kissing the beautiful women.” The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is the work of a poet uncertain of his visionary gift, doubtful of his art’s worth or purpose, yet sure of the power of language.
This edition of Aldous Huxley’s The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems 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.
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.
Read more from Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brave New World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Brave New World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Brave New World Collection: Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlong the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devils of Loudun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brave New World Revisited Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Those Barren Leaves Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Crome Yellow Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Antic Hay Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Genius and the Goddess: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After the Fireworks: Three Novellas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Aldous Huxley Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Doors of Perception Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
Related ebooks
Mortal Coils Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Burning Wheel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Antic Hay Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLimbo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwo or Three Graces: And Other Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Crome Yellow Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Those Barren Leaves Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5After the Fireworks: Three Novellas Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Genius and the Goddess: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Essential Novelists - Aldous Huxley: the strangeness of things Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSiddhartha Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Jacob's Hands: A Fable Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Burning Wheel: “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Devils of Loudun Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The idiot Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Defeat of Youth & Other Poems: 'With the poor lonely life of transient things'' Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAn Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Social Contract Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAlong the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Earth Gods Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Moon and Sixpence Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kim Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Against the Grain Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeda Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDockhead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Enormous Room Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pan Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Complete Novels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Enough Rope: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems - Aldous Huxley
THE DEFEAT OF YOUTH
I. Under the Trees
There had been phantoms, pale-remembered shapes
Of this and this occasion, sisterly
In their resemblances, each effigy
Crowned with the same bright hair above the nape’s
White rounded firmness, and each body alert
With such swift loveliness, that very rest
Seemed a poised movement: … phantoms that impressed
But a faint influence and could bless or hurt
No more than dreams. And these ghost things were she;
For formless still, without identity,
Not one she seemed, not clear, but many and dim.
One face among the legions of the street,
Indifferent mystery, she was for him
Something still uncreated, incomplete.
II
Bright windy sunshine and the shadow of cloud
Quicken the heavy summer to new birth
Of life and motion on the drowsing earth;
The huge elms stir, till all the air is loud
With their awakening from the muffled sleep
Of long hot days. And on the wavering line
That marks the alternate ebb of shade and shine,
Under the trees, a little group is deep
In laughing talk. The shadow as it flows
Across them dims the lustre of a rose,
Quenches the bright clear gold of hair, the green
Of a girl’s dress, and life seems faint. The light
Swings back, and in the rose a fire is seen,
Gold hair’s aflame and green grows emerald bright.
III
She leans, and there is laughter in the face
She turns towards him; and it seems a door
Suddenly opened on some desolate place
With a burst of light and music. What before
Was hidden shines in loveliness revealed.
Now first he sees her beautiful, and knows
That he must love her; and the doom is sealed
Of all his happiness and all the woes
That shall be born of pregnant years hereafter.
The swift poise of a head, a flutter of laughter—
And love flows in on him, its vastness pent
Within his narrow life: the pain it brings,
Boundless; for love is infinite discontent
With the poor lonely life of transient things.
IV
Men see their god, an immanence divine,
Smile through the curve of flesh or moulded clay,
In bare ploughed lands that go sloping away
To meet the sky in one clean exquisite line.
Out of the short-seen dawns of ecstasy
They draw new beauty, whence new thoughts are born
And in their turn conceive, as grains of corn
Germ and create new life and endlessly
Shall live creating. Out of earthly seeds
Springs the aerial flower. One spirit proceeds
Through change, the same in body and in soul—
The spirit of life and love that triumphs still
In its slow struggle towards some far-off goal
Through lust and death and the bitterness of