On 13 August the Longs drove through Providence on their way to Cape Cod and picked up Lovecraft to accompany them. New Bedford was explored that day, as well as other towns in the vicinity—Chatham, Orleans, Hyannis, Sandwich. But the best part of the journey for Lovecraft was on the 17th, when he took his first ride in an aeroplane. It was only $3.00, and would fly passengers all over Buzzard’s Bay. It proved no disappointment: ‘The landscape effect was that of a bird’s eye view map—& the scene was such as to lend itself to this inspection with maximum advantage … This aeroplane ride (which attained a pretty good height at its maximum) adds a finishing touch to the perfection of the present outing.’13 For someone with so cosmic an imagination as Lovecraft, it is scarcely to be wondered that a ride in an aeroplane would be a powerful imaginative stimulus; and only poverty prevented his ever repeating the experience.
One more trip occurred on 29 August. Lovecraft and Annie Gamwell took yet another sojourn to the ancestral Foster region, renewing their acquaintances of three years earlier and extending their explorations still further. This time they investigated the area called Howard Hill, where Asaph Phillips had built his homestead in 1790. They met several people who recalled Whipple Phillips and Robie Place, saw old Phillips gravestones, and consulted genealogical records that helped Lovecraft fill in details of his ancestry. Later they returned to Moosup Valley, the site of their 1926 trip.
In the fall of 1929 Lovecraft and Derleth engaged in a debate over the best weird stories ever written. This may have been part of the honours thesis Derleth was writing (‘The Weird Tale in English Since 1890’, completed in 1930 and published in W. Paul Cook’s late amateur journal, the Ghost, for May 1945), but, whatever the case, the discussion ended up having an unexpectedly wider audience. Bertrand K. Hart, literary editor of the Providence Journal, who ran a column called ‘The Sideshow’, published a list of the best weird tales that Lovecraft found so tame that he sent in the lists prepared by Derleth and Frank Long, as well as his own.
Lovecraft was tickled by his appearance in the paper. He did not ordinarily like to obtrude himself as a persistent bombarder of letters to the editorial page, feeling it callow and self-promotional; but around this time another matter far more pressing to him than an academic discussion of weird fiction forced him once again into a vigorous letter-writing campaign. In spring it had been announced that the old warehouses along South Water Street would be torn down to make way for what was announced as a new hall of records (adjacent to the very fine neo-Georgian court house, built in 1928–33, at the corner of College and North Main Streets). Appalled at the threatened destruction, he wrote a long letter on 20 March 1929 (published in the Sunday Journal for 24 March) appealing almost frantically to the city government not to destroy the buildings. But Lovecraft must have known that the fate of the warehouses was sealed. As a final ploy he resurrected his rusty poetic skills and wrote a poignant twelve-stanza poem, ‘The East India Brick Row’, on 12 December. It appeared in the Providence Journal on 8 January 1930.
‘The East India Brick Row’ was written in the midst of an unexpected burst of poetry at the end of 1929. At the very beginning of the year, or perhaps in late 1928, Lovecraft had written the powerful weird poem ‘The Wood’ (Tryout, January 1929)—a poem that finally begins to exemplify those principles of poetry as a living language that Lovecraft had now embraced and was inculcating to Elizabeth Toldridge and others.
‘The Outpost’, written on 26 November, inaugurated the poetic outburst. It is not a great success, and was rejected by Farnsworth Wright as being too long (it is in thirteen quatrains). It speaks of the ‘great King who fears to dream’ in a palace in Zimbabwe. The poem seems clearly inspired by various anecdotes told to Lovecraft by Edward Lloyd Sechrist, who had actually been to the ruins of Zimbabwe in Africa.
At this point B. K. Hart re-enters the scene. The discussion of weird fiction had about died down when Hart stumbled upon a copy of T. Everett Harrés’ Beware After Dark! containing ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. While enjoying the tale, he was startled to note that Wilcox’s residence at 7 Thomas Street was one he himself had once occupied. Hart, in a column published in the Journal for 30 November, pretended to take umbrage and made a dire threat: he would send over a monster to Lovecraft’s house at 3 a.m. What else could Lovecraft do but, that night at 3 a.m., write ‘The Messenger’?
The thing, he said, would come that night at three From the old churchyard on the hill below;
But crouching by an oak fire’s wholesome glow, I tried to tell myself it could not be.
Surely, I mused, it was a pleasantry
Devised by one who did not truly know
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.
He had not meant it—no—but still I lit
Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed
Three—and the firelight faded, bit by bit.
Then at the door that cautious rattling came—
And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!
Winfield Townley Scott—he who had referred to the bulk of Lovecraft’s verse as ‘eighteenth-century rubbish’—calls this ‘perhaps as wholly satisfactory as any poem he ever wrote’.14 B. K. Hart must have been pleased with the piece, for he printed it in his column for 3 December 1929.
‘The East India Brick Row’ followed in early December, after which Lovecraft wrote what I might regard as his single most successful poem, ‘The Ancient Track’. ‘There was no hand to hold me back / That night I found the ancient track’, begins—and ends— this brooding, pensive lyric, written in Poe-esque iambic trimeter. This poem readily sold to Weird Tales, where it appeared in the March 1930 issue and for which Lovecraft received $11.00.
Then, in the remarkable week between 27 December and 4 January, Lovecraft wrote the Fungi from Yuggoth. The thirty-six sonnets that make up this sequence are generally regarded as his most sustained weird poetic work, and the cycle has accordingly generated a considerable body of criticism. Before studying the text itself, it may be well to consider some of the factors that may have led to this tremendous outburst of weird verse.
The most general influence, perhaps, is Clark Ashton Smith. While it is true that fiction had, by around 1921, already come at least to equal poetry as Lovecraft’s major aesthetic outlet, it can also be no accident that the virtual surcease of his poetic output from 1922 to 1928 commenced at the very time he came in touch with Smith. Here was a poet who was writing dense, vigorous weird and cosmic poetry in a vibrant, vital manner as far removed as possible from the eighteenth century or even from the poetry of Poe. Lovecraft had long realized, in an abstract way, the deficiencies of his own poetry, but had rarely encountered a living poet doing work he could admire and even envy; now he came upon just such a poet. Lovecraft’s verse during this period accordingly descends to harmless birthday odes or other occasional verse, with rare exceptions such as the powerful ‘The Cats’, ‘Primavera’, or ‘Festival’ (published as ‘Yule Horror’).