Burning Wheel

The Burning Wheel is an early poetry collection by English writer Aldous Huxley, first published in 1916 when he was twenty-two. It follows an artist at the start of a creative life, drawn to a world that is either renewing itself or sinking into full-scale war.

Huxley is better known as a novelist, but these poems show a strong command of language and a keen ear for the musical quality of words. The title poem opens the collection with a shifting, colorful picture of life and creation, and it reflects the influence of the French Symbolists. Its central image is a wheel that tires of turning and pauses briefly. The wheel is both a machine and a pure, wild flame, and it stands for the poet's compulsion to make art, a mind that wakes from quiet brilliance into restless, darkening feeling.

Elsewhere, "Quotidian Vision" turns to everyday life, describing a gloomy street and people walking with bowed heads. Written in plain rhyming couplets, the poems draw on the manner of William Blake, as the speaker looks past a cold, grey haze to see the world restored with beauty. The collection has received relatively little attention, though it offers a view of Huxley's poetic beginnings.