To this analysis very little need be added. What it demonstrates is that Lovecraft utilized poetry not for aesthetic but for psychological ends: as a means of tricking himself into believing that the eighteenth century still existed—or, at least, that he was a product of the eighteenth century who had somehow been transported into an alien and repulsive era. And if the ‘sole test of excellence’ of Lovecraft’s verse was its success in duplicating the style of the great Georgian poets, then it must flatly be declared that his poetry is a resounding failure. He certainly manages to copy the mechanical externals of eighteenth-century verse, but its vital essence invariably escapes him.
Lovecraft’s poetry falls into a number of groupings differentiated generally by subject matter. The bulk of his verse must fall under the broad rubric of occasional poetry; within this class there are such things as poems to friends and associates, seasonal poems, poems on amateur affairs, imitations of classical poetry (especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and other miscellaneous verse. There is, at least up to about 1919, a large array of political or patriotic verse, almost entirely worthless. There is also a small group of mediocre philosophical or didactic verse. Satiric poetry bulks large in Lovecraft’s early period, and this is perhaps the most consistently meritorious of his early metrical output. Weird verse does not become extensive until 1917—the precise time when Lovecraft resumed the writing of weird fiction—so shall be considered later. These categories of course overlap: some of the satiric poetry is directed toward colleagues or individuals in the amateur circle, or is on political subjects.
Of the occasional poetry in general it is difficult to speak kindly. In many instances one quite is literally at a loss to wonder what Lovecraft was attempting to accomplish with such verse. These poems appear frequently to have served merely as the equivalents of letters. Indeed, Lovecraft once confessed that ‘In youth I scarcely did any letter-writing—thanking anybody for a present was so much of an ordeal that I would rather have written a two-hundredfifty-line pastoral or a twenty-page treatise on the rings of Saturn’.6
Of the seasonal poems very little can be said. There are poems on almost every month of the year, as well as each of the individual seasons; but all are trite, mechanical, and quite without genuine feeling. One heroic work—in more ways than one—that requires some consideration is ‘Old Christmas’ (Tryout, December 1918; written in late 1917), a 332-line monstrosity that is Lovecraft’s single longest poem. Actually, if one can accept the premise of this poem—a re-creation of a typical Christmas night in the England of Queen Anne’s time—then one can derive a certain enjoyment from its resolutely wholesome and cheerful couplets. The sheer geniality of the poem eventually wins one over if one can endure the antiquated diction.
Two facets of Lovecraft’s poetry that must be passed over in merciful brevity are his classical imitations and his philosophical poetry. Lovecraft seemed endlessly fond of producing flaccid imitations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—his first poetic love, let us recall—including such things as ‘Hylas and Myrrha: A Tale’ (Tryout, May 1919), ‘Myrrha and Strephon’ (Tryout, July 1919), and several others. Of the early philosophical poetry, only a few are notable. ‘Inspiration’ (Conservative, October 1916) is a delicate two-stanza poem on literary inspiration coming to a writer at an unexpected moment. It is of importance largely because it is the very first piece of professionally published poetry by Lovecraft outside of local newspaper appearances: it was reprinted in the National Magazine of Boston in November 1916. Lovecraft had a number of poems printed in this magazine over the next several years.
As the years passed, it became evident to Lovecraft’s readers in the amateur press (as it was always evident to Lovecraft himself) that in his poetry he was a self-consciously antiquated fossil with admirable technical skill but no real poetic feeling. Eventually Lovecraft began to poke fun at himself on this score, as in ‘On the Death of a Rhyming Critic’ (Toledo Amateur, July 1917) and ‘The Dead Bookworm’ (United Amateur, September 1919).
This brings us to Lovecraft’s satiric poetry, which not only ranges over a very wide array of subject matter but is clearly the only facet of his poetry aside from his weird verse that is of any account. Kleiner made this point in ‘A Note on Howard P. Lovecraft’s Verse’ (United Amateur, March 1919), the first critical article on Lovecraft:
Many who cannot read his longer and more ambitious productions find Mr. Lovecraft’s light or humorous verse decidedly refreshing. As a satirist along familiar lines, particularly those laid down by Butler, Swift and Pope, he is most himself—paradoxical as it seems. In reading his satires one cannot help but feel the zest with which the author has composed them. They are admirable for the way in which they reveal the depth and intensity of Mr. Lovecraft’s convictions, while the wit, irony, sarcasm and humour to be found in them serve as an indication of his powers as a controversialist. The almost relentless ferocity of his satires is constantly relieved by an attendant broad humour which has the merit of causing the reader to chuckle more than once in the perusal of some attack levelled against the particular person or policy which may have incurred Mr. Lovecraft’s displeasure.
This analysis is exactly on target. Lovecraft himself remarked in 1921: ‘Whatever merriment I have is always derived from the satirical principle.’7
Literary faults or literary modernism (much the same thing to Lovecraft at this time) are also the target of many satires. When Charles D. Isaacson in his amateur journal In a Minor Key championed Walt Whitman as the ‘Greatest American Thinker’, Lovecraft responded with a sizzling rebuttal in prose entitled ‘In a Major Key’ (Conservative, July 1915) in which he included an untitled poem on Whitman:
Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line
Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever’d fancy shuns the measur’d place, And copies Ovid’s filth without his grace.
And so on. Whitman was the perfect anathema for Lovecraft at this time, not only in his scornful abandonment of traditional metre but in his frank discussions of both homosexual and heterosexual sex.
Lovecraft’s greatest poem in this regard is ‘Amissa Minerva’ (Toledo Amateur, May 1919). Steven J. Mariconda has written a thorough commentary on this poem, and has illuminated many of its distinctive features.8 After supplying a highly encapsulated history of poetry from Homer to Swinburne, Lovecraft launches upon a systematic attack on modern poetry, mentioning Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and others by name. The subject matter of modern poetry offends Lovecraft (‘Exempt from wit, each dullard pours his ink / In odes to bathtubs, or the kitchen sink’) as much as its abandonment of traditional rhyme and metre.
Actually, Lovecraft’s first exposure to poetic radicalism had occurred some years before. ‘I have lately been amusing myself by a perusal of some of the “Imagism” nonsense of the day’, he writes in August 1916.9 ‘As a species of pathological phenomena it is interesting.’ This provides a sufficient indication of Lovecraft’s attitude toward free verse in general and Imagism in particular. I am not sure what works Lovecraft read at this time; perhaps he read some of the three anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets, which appeared between 1915 and 1917. He sums up his objections to modern poetry in ‘The Vers Libre Epidemic’ (Conservative, January 1917). Here Lovecraft distinguishes between two forms of radicalism, one of mere form, the other of thought and ideals. For the first, Lovecraft cites a fellow-amateur, Anne Tillery Renshaw, whom he admired greatly for her devotion to the amateur cause but whose poetic theories he found every opportunity to rebut. He frequently remarks that, for all the metrical novelty of her own poetry, it very often lapses in spite of itself into fairly orthodox forms. In ‘Metrical Regularity’ (Conservative, July 1915) Lovecraft paraphrases her theory (‘the truly inspired bard must chant forth his feelings independently of form or language, permitting each changing impulse to alter the rhythm of his lay, and blindly resigning his reason to the “fine frenzy” of his mood’) as expressed in an article in her amateur journal, Ole Miss’, for May 1915; to which Lovecraft makes the pointed response: ‘The “language of the heart” must be clarified and made intelligible to other hearts, else its purport will forever be confined to its creator.’ This single sentence could serve as an adequate indictment of the obscurantism of much twentieth-century poetry.