The Burning Wheel

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.

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.