Aldous Huxley's gleaming satire, his mockery of the human species, he here translates into images and phrases that startle and delight. Rebecca West says "This is quite beautiful verse, that not the most academic defender of the traditions of English poetry could defame. A great many of the lines sing themselves into the memory at a first reading; several of the poems build up such a unity of sound that one is able to think of them, apart from their thought, as a single shapely object like a beautiful vase." Huxley's last collection of poetry. Of the thirty poems here, five had already appeared in his earlier 1925 novel Those Barren Leaves.