“They Were About Being Alone”: The Poetry of Solitude, Loneliness, or In Between (2027 NeMLA Creative Session, Newport, RI
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, humans are conditioned to seek out human companionship and to despise being by themselves. Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer of Emotional Engineering, relates a story to Bernard Marx about being disciplined for sharing some of his poems with the students he was paid to indoctrinate. When asked what the poems had been about, Helmholtz tells a surprised Bernard, “They were about being alone.”
