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.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript,
this edition of Aldous Huxley's The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems is
a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
