[Huxley's] early poetry is a record of the highly complicated inner struggle which influenced, even determined the theme and the shape of his much more popular, much more successful fiction. After The Burning Wheel he quickly produced Jonah (… 1917), The Defeat of Youth (… 1918) and Leda (… 1920), and he appeared several times in the annuals Oxford Poetry and Wheels. Although this work shows some development in technique, some improvement in quality, it illustrates more clearly Huxley's shifting and ambivalent attitude toward the very practice of literary art. Like his fiction, Huxley's verse embodies his need to express himself entangled inextricably with the problem of how to do so. From the earliest poems the crucial inner conflict appears; Huxley tries various styles to express it; the need to choose a style then intensifies the conflict as Huxley is forced to choose between sincere expression and effective poetry. It is this dilemma I have attempted to follow, up to the point where Huxley virtually abandoned verse for fiction.
The first sign of inner conflict is a startling inconsistency between poems expressing a rebellious desire to shock and other poems voicing merely conventional sentiment. Huxley's first published poem, "Home-Sickness … From the Town," is as obviously anti-Victorian as anything he ever was to write…. As in so many of the novels, a deliberately shocking frankness about sex is combined with the makings of a new poetic style forged of knowing allusions and esoteric words. Yet in The Burning Wheel a few months later we find verses in the very manner Huxley seemed to have attacked, poems almost shockingly banal and stale where conventional phrases and worn-out notions abound. "Escape" begins like inferior Tennyson…. "Philoclea in the Forest," an even staler poem, is set amidst Arcadian wood-moths, flowers, and lutes. "Sentimental Summer" is a maudlin poem of love…. (pp. 64-5)
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