This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence of Lovecraft’s supposed insensitivy to modernism and of his innate aesthetic conservatism; but it is difficult to see what other reaction he could have made at this stage of his development. It should also be pointed out that many other reviewers—not merely stodgy Victorians like J. C. Squire but level-headed modernists like Conrad Aiken—also found the poem incomprehensible or at least ambiguous and incoherent, although some did not think it a bad poem on that account. As for Lovecraft, he may by this time have given up his literal adherence to eighteenth-century forms—or, at least, his requirement that all other poets do so—but the outward form of The Waste Land with its free verse and its seemingly random progression so offended him that he saw in the poem an actual instance of the aesthetic fragmentation of modern civilization that other reviewers felt it to be expressing.
I think too much has been made of the supposed similarities in philosophy and temperament of Eliot and Lovecraft: to be sure, they may both have been classicists (of a sort) and believed in continuity of culture; but Lovecraft rightly scorned Eliot’s later royalism as a mere ostrich-act and heaped even more abuse on Eliot’s belief in religion as a necessary foundation or bulwark of civilization.
But Lovecraft’s other response to The Waste Land—the exquisite parody ‘Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance’—merits greater attention; for this is his best satirical poem. One wishes, therefore, that there was even the least bit of evidence as to when this poem was written and when it appeared in ‘the newspaper’, as Lovecraft casually notes a decade later.20 This is the only occasion, so far as is known, that Lovecraft even mentions his poem; searches have been made in several of the Providence papers of the period with no results.
What Lovecraft very simply seeks to do in this work is to carry to a reductio ad absurdum his own claim in the Conservative editorial that The Waste Land is a ‘practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general’. In many parts of this quite lengthy poem (135 lines) he has quite faithfully parodied the insularity of modern poetry—its ability to be understood only by a small coterie of readers who are aware of intimate facts about the poet. The ending can only be quoted:
Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
Good night, good night, the stars are bright I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight
Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.
Nobody home
In the shantih.
That delightful final pun ‘confirms the jerrybuilt quality of modern life and art’, as Barton L. St Armand and John H. Stanley remark; and as for the poem as a whole, its ‘scraps of twentieth-century conversations, news bulletins, public announcements, newspaper headlines, and advertising jingles reflect the mundane tawdriness of the present as contrasted to the epic grandeur of the past’.21
Meanwhile Lovecraft had simultaneously been hammering out a theory of the weird tale that would, with some modifications, serve him his entire life. This theory is, like his aesthetics in general, an intimate outgrowth of his entire philosophical thought, especially his metaphysics and ethics. The central document here is the In Defence of Dagon essays—a series of three articles he wrote to an Anglo-American correspondence group, the Transatlantic Circulator, in defence of his philosophical and aesthetic views. He begins by dividing fiction, somewhat unorthodoxly, into three divisions— romantic, realistic, and imaginative. The first ‘is for those who value action and emotion for their own sake; who are interested in striking events which conform to a preconceived artificial pattern’. The second ‘is for those who are intellectual and analytical rather than poetical or emotional … It has the virtue of being close to life, but has the disadvantage of sinking into the commonplace and the unpleasant at times.’ Lovecraft does not provide an explicit definition of imaginative fiction, but implies that it draws upon the best features of both the other two: like romanticism, imaginative fiction bases its appeal on emotions (the emotions of fear, wonder, and terror); from realism it derives the important principle of truth—not truth to fact, as in realism, but truth to human feeling. As a result, Lovecraft comes up with the somewhat startling deduction that ‘The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its most essential sense.’
The attack on what Lovecraft called ‘romanticism’ is one he never relinquished. The term must not be understood here in any historical sense—Lovecraft had great respect and fondness for such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge—but purely theoretically, as embodying an approach not only to literature but to life generally:
The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely unsound, charlatanic, and valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant, and meaningless—is that mode of handling human events and values and motivations known as romanticism. Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd! Here is sheer puerility— the concoction of false glamours and enthusiasms and events out of an addled and distorted background which has no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings, and experiences of evolved and adult mankind.22
This remark, although made in 1930, makes clear that his enemy here is his whipping-boy of 1923, Victorianism. It was this approach—the instilling of ‘glamour’ or significance into certain phases of human activity (notably love)—that Lovecraft believed to be most invalidated by the findings of modern science. And yet, his vehemence on this issue may stem from another cause as welclass="underline" the possibility that his very different brand of weird fiction might conceivably be confused with (or be considered an aspect of) romanticism. Lovecraft knew that the weird tale had emerged in the course of the romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so that, in the eyes of many, weird fiction itself was a phase of Romanticism and might be thought to have ‘no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings, and experiences of evolved and adult mankind’.
Accordingly, Lovecraft always strove to ally weird fiction with realism, which he knew to be the dominant mode of contemporary expression. This realism extended not merely to technique (‘a tale should be plausible—even a bizarre tale except for the single element where supernaturalism is involved’, he says in a letter of 192123), but in terms of philosophical orientation. Of course, it cannot be realistic in terms of events, so it must be realistic in terms of human emotions. Lovecraft again contrasts romanticism (an ‘overcoloured representation of what purports to be real life’) with fantasy: ‘But fantasy is something altogether different. Here we have an art based on the imaginative life of the human mind, frankly recognised as such; and in its way as natural and scientific—as truly related to natural (even if uncommon and delicate) psychological processes as the starkest of photographic realism.’24
When asked by A. H. Brown, a Canadian member of the Transatlantic Circulator, why he didn’t write more about ‘ordinary people’, since this might increase the audience for his work, Lovecraft replied with towering scorn:
I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man’s relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background.