The defeat of youth, and other poems

Aldous Huxley is an English writer, science fiction writer, novelist and philosopher, as well as the author of the famous dystopian novel Brave New World. Aldous Huxley is best known for his essays and novels, although he began his writing career as a poet. This collection of poems was published in 1918, The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems, and is Huxley's third collection of poems. The volume begins with the poem "The Defeat of Youth", which consists of a sequence of twenty-two sonnets exploring the irreconcilability of the ideal and the disappointing reality. In the rest of the volume, Huxley continues to explore themes begun in his first collection of poems, The Burning Wheel, including vision, blindness, and other contrasts. The volume concludes with two English translations by Huxley of two French poems: Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Les Chercheuses de poux", translated as "The Louse Hunters" and Stéphane Mallarmé's poem "L'Après-midi d'un faune".