+ Review 3:502 N 24 ’20 100w
HUXLEY, ALDOUS LEONARD. Leda. *$1.50 Doran 821
20–16190
In this collection of poems the title poem describes the Olympian love episode with singular beauty of diction as well as mundane realism. The other poems, some of which are poetic prose, all betray more or less of sardonic humor, as when the poet suddenly finds himself sobered from the “intoxicating speed” of the merry-go-round when he perceives “a slobbering cretin grinding at a wheel and sweating as he ground, and grinding eternally.” Some of the other titles are: The birth of God; Male and female created He them; Life and art; First—Second—Fifth—and Ninth philosopher’s song; The merry-go-round; Last things; Evening party; Soles occidere et redire possunt.
“We cannot accept it. The elements that Mr Huxley has desired to combine, the precious esoteric beauty and the ugliness which were to be blended into a new comprehensive beauty in whose light nothing should appear common or unclean, are still as unmixed as oil and vinegar. If Mr Huxley wishes to be judged, he should elect to be judged, not by ‘Leda,’ nor by any of the shorter poems in this book, but by ‘Soles occidere et redire possunt.’ As for two-thirds of the shorter pieces, we think he would have been well advised never to print them.” J. M. M.
− + Ath p699 My 28 ’20 1500w
“Aldous Huxley exposes the fallacy that the imagination needs any special material in which to exercise the creative spirit of poetry. His book opens with a successful and beautiful poem on a mythical legend. The book closes with an elegy for a friend lost in the war, and here the elements are, one might say, sardonically modern, the very naked realities of life gathered up and fused with a temper that makes the spirit of poetry no less golden than the substance in the more remote Hellenic rumor of the seduction of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan.” W: S. Braithwaite
+ Boston Transcript p4 S 4 ’20 1850w
“When he is complaining or mocking Mr Huxley can rise to real heights of bombast; at such times he writes good mouth-filling stuff with a little of the Elizabethan spirit, but with more acidity. It is for his satires, then, that he is to be valued, rather than for any gropings toward a philosophy; for his prose poems as long as they are satires; for ‘Soles occidere et redire possunt’ as long as it remains a criticism and a complaint. Most of his other work must be disregarded.” Malcolm Cowley