The second, more disturbing type of radicalism—of thought and ideals—is treated more harshly. In ‘The Vers Libre Epidemic’ this school is said to be represented by ‘Amy Lowell at her worst’: ‘a motley horde of hysterical and half-witted rhapsodists whose basic principle is the recording of their momentary moods and psychopathic phenomena in whatever amorphous and meaningless phrases may come to their tongues or pens at the moment of inspirational (or epileptic) seizure’. This is fine polemic, but not very good reasoned argument. Lovecraft would carry on the battle against avant-garde poetry for the rest of his life, although one imagines that by the 1930s he was beginning to feel that the struggle was hopeless. But this did not alter his devotion to conservative poetry, although in his later arguments he modified his position considerably and advocated the view that poetry must speak straightforwardly, but elegantly and coherently, in the language of its own day.
Lovecraft frequently used pseudonyms for his contributions to the amateur press, especially for poetry. A total of about twenty pseudonyms have so far been identified. Only a few, however, were used with any regularity: Humphry Littlewit, Esq.; Henry PagetLowe; Ward Phillips; Edward Softly; and, most frequent of all, Lewis Theobald, Jun. Some of these names are scarcely very concealing of Lovecraft’s identity. The Lewis Theobald pseudonym, of course, derives from the hapless Shakespearian scholar whom Pope pilloried in the first version (1728) of The Dunciad.
In some cases Lovecraft used pseudonyms merely because he was contributing poetry so voluminously to the amateur press— especially to C. W. Smith’s Tryout—that he perhaps did not wish to create the impression that he was hogging more space than he deserved. In other instances, Lovecraft may have genuinely wished to disguise his identity because of the anomalous content of the poem involved. But it becomes very difficult to characterize some of Lovecraft’s pseudonyms, especially those under which a large number of works were published, and he evidently used them merely as the spirit moved him and without much thought of creating any genuine persona for the pseudonyms in question.
Many of Lovecraft’s early poems were on political subjects. Political events of the period 1914–17 offered abundant opportunities for Lovecraft’s polemical pen, given his early attitudes on race, social class, and militarism. Lovecraft could of course not know that his entry into amateur journalism in April 1914 would occur only four months before the outbreak of the First World War; but once the war did commence, and once he saw that his country was not about to enter it any time soon to stand with his beloved England, Lovecraft’s ire was stirred. For prose attacks on world affairs his chosen vehicle was the Conservative; his verses on world affairs were scattered far and wide throughout amateurdom.
Lovecraft could not abide Americans not standing with their English brethren to battle the Huns, and it must have infuriated him not merely that the government failed to intervene in the European war but that American public opinion was resolutely against such intervention. Even the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915—resulting in the loss of 128 Americans in its death toll of more than 1200–only began a slow change in people’s minds against Germany. The incident led Lovecraft to write a thunderous polemic in verse, ‘The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania, 1915’. There is no question of Lovecraft’s burning sincerity in this poem; but the antiquated metre and diction he has used here makes it difficult to take the poem seriously, and it gains an unintentional air of frivolity, almost of self-parody. This could be said for much of Lovecraft’s political verse.
‘The Crime of Crimes’ has the distinction of being Lovecraft’s first separately published work. It appeared in a Welsh amateur journal, Interesting Items, for July 1915, and apparently at about the same time was issued as a four-page pamphlet by the editor of the paper, Arthur Harris of Llandudno, Wales. This item is now one of the rarest of Lovecraft’s publications; only three copies are known to exist. I do not know how Lovecraft came in touch with Harris; perhaps he sent him the first issue of the Conservative. In any event, Lovecraft stayed sporadically in touch with Harris for the rest of his life.
The Lusitania incident led to President Woodrow Wilson’s celebrated utterance, ‘There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight’, something that infuriated Lovecraft and which he threw back in Wilson’s teeth at every opportunity, especially in poems. Lovecraft published an array of anti-pacifist poems (‘Pacifist War Song—1917’, Tryout, March 1917; ‘The Peace Advocate’, Tryout, May 1917) and articles (‘The Renaissance of Manhood’, Conservative, October 1915), along with any number of truly awful poems expressing loyalty to England (‘1914’, Interesting Items, March 1915; ‘An American to Mother England’, Poesy, January 1916; ‘The Rose of England’, Scot, October 1916; ‘Britannia Victura’, Inspiration, April 1917; ‘An American to the British Flag’, Little Budget, December 1917).
Lovecraft’s immediate reaction to the war, however, was a curious one. He did not care what the actual causes of the war were, or who was to blame; his prime concern was in stopping what he saw was a suicidal racial civil war between the two sides of ‘Anglo-Saxondom’. It is here that Lovecraft’s racism comes fully to the forefront: ‘In the unnatural racial alignment of the various warring powers we behold a defiance of anthropological principles that cannot but bode ill for the future of the world.’ This is from ‘The Crime of the Century’, one of the salvoes in Lovecraft’s first issue (April 1915) of the Conservative. What makes the war so appalling for Lovecraft is that England and Germany (as well as Belgium, Holland, Austria, Scandinavia, and Switzerland) are all part of the Teutonic race, and therefore should on no account be battling each other. Political enemies though they may be, England and Germany are racially one:
The Teuton is the summit of evolution. That we may consider intelligently his place in history we must cast aside the popular nomenclature which would confuse the names ‘Teuton’ and ‘German’, and view him not nationally but racially, identifying his fundamental stock with the tall, pale, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, long-headed ‘Xanthochroi’ as described by Huxley, amongst whom the class of languages we call ‘Teutonic’ arose, and who today constitute the majority of the Teutonic-speaking population of our globe.