The tale contains the first mention of the term “Miskatonic” and the fictional city of Arkham. The location of Arkham has been the source of considerable debate. Will Murray conjectured that the Arkham of “The Picture in the House” was situated in central Massachusetts, but Robert D.Marten concludes that HPL had always conceived of Arkham (as he did explicitly in later tales) to be an approximate analogue of Salem, hence on the eastern coast of Massachusetts. The name Arkham may (as Marten speculates) have been coined from Arkwright, a former village (now incorporated into the town of Fiskville) in Rhode Island. “Miskatonic” (which Murray, studying its Algonguin roots, translates approximately to “red-mountain-place”) appears to be derived by analogy from Housatonic, a well-known river running from central Massachusetts through Connecticut. HPL makes numerous errors in his description of Pigafetta’s Regnum Congo,since he derived his information secondhand from an appendix to Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay “On the History of the Man-like Apes,” in Man’s Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays(1894). The story is the first to make exhaustive use of a backwoods New England dialect that HPL would employ in several later tales for purposes of verisimilitude. Jason C.Eckhardt has plausibly conjectured that its use here derives largely from James Russell Lowell’s Biglow Papers(1848–62), where a slightly different version of the dialect is used. Eckhardt notes that Lowell himself de
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clares the dialect to be long extinct in New England; its use by HPL thereby enhances the suggestion of the old man’s preternatural age.
HPL’s brooding opening reflections on the unnatural repressiveness of early New England life and the neuroses it produced are echoed in his analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (see also SL3.175).
HPL revised the tale somewhat for later appearances; one alteration was particularly significant. At the conclusion of his initial portrayal of the old man, HPL had written: “On a beard which might have been patriarchal were unsightly stains, some of them disgustingly suggestive of blood.” This catastrophically telegraphs the ending, and he wisely omitted it for subsequent appearances. See Peter Cannon, “Parallel Passages in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ and ‘The Picture in the House,’” LSNo. 1 (Fall 1979): 3–6; S.T. Joshi, “Lovecraft and the Regnum Congo” CryptNo. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 13–17; Will Murray, “In Search of Arkham Country,” LSNo. 13 (Fall 1986): 54–67; Jason C.Eckhardt, “The Cosmic Yankee” (in ET); Robert H.Waugh, “‘The Picture in the House’: Images of Complicity,” LSNo. 32 (Spring 1995): 2–8; Robert D.Marten, “Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers,” LSNo. 39 (Summer 1998): 1–20; Scott Connors, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” LSNo. 41 (Spring 1999): 2–9; J.C. Owens, “The Mirror in the House: Looking at the Horror of Looking at the Horror,” LSNo. 42 (Summer 2001): 74–79.
Pierce, Ammi
(born c. 1842, as was Ambrose Bierce, whose name his own resembles). In “The Colour out of Space,” he is the only person who will tell the narrator of the events that befell his neighbors, the Nahum Gardner family, which he witnessed largely at first hand.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849),
American author and predominant literary influence on HPL, who read him beginning at the age of eight. Poe pioneered the short story, the short horror tale, and the detective story; he was also an important poet, critic, and reviewer. In 1916 HPL referred to Poe as “my God of Fiction” ( SL1.20); only the subsequent influence of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen diluted the Poe influence on HPL’s early work. As late as 1929 HPL was lamenting: “There are my ‘Poe’ pieces & my ‘Dunsany’ pieces— but alas—where are any ‘Lovecraft’ pieces?” ( SL2.315, where “any” is misprinted as “my”). HPL’s “The Outsider” draws on “Berenice” and “The Masque of the Red Death”; “The Hound” is very Poesque in style; “The Rats in the Walls” shows the influence of “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “Cool Air” was perhaps influenced by “Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar,” although HPL believed Machen’s “Novel of the White Powder” to be a more central influence. At the Mountains of Madness draws slightly upon The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket(1838). Poe’s poetry also influenced HPL (mostly in terms of metrical schemes) in such poems as “Nemesis,” “The City,” “The House,” “The Eidolon,” “The Nightmare Lake,” “Despair,” “Nathicana,” and others. HPL echoes Poe’s doctrine of the unity of effect in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” and exemplifies it in his tales. HPL saw Poe as the central figure in the development of horror fiction, modifying the moribund Gothic conventions so that they became capable of revealing psychological realities; accordingly, he devoted a substantial chapter to Poe in
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“Supernatural Horror in Literature.” HPL also wrote “Homes and Shrines of Poe,” a discursive survey of Poe’s residences in Virginia, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere (nearly all of which he had visited in person), for Hyman Bradofsky’s Californian(Winter 1934). In August 1936, he wrote an acrostic “sonnet” on Poe’s name, titling it (in the original ms.) “In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d” (first published in Science-Fantasy Correspondent,March–April 1937).
See T.O.Mabbott, “Lovecraft as a Student of Poe,” Fresco8, No. 3 (Spring 1958): 37–39; Robert Bloch, “Poe and Lovecraft” (1973; rpt. FDOC); Dirk W. Mosig, “Poe, Hawthorne and Lovecraft: Variations on a Theme of Panic,” RomantistNos. 4–5 (1980–81): 43–45; Robert M.Price, “Lovecraft and ‘Ligeia,’” LSNo. 31 (Fall 1994): 15–17.
“Poe-et’s Nightmare, The.”
Poem (303 lines); written in 1916 (see SL1.59). First published in the Vagrant(July 1918); rpt. WT (July 1952) (central section only; titled “Aletheia Phrikodes”).
One of HPL’s longest poems, and perhaps his most ambitious single weird poem. It recounts (in rhyming couplets) how Lucullus Languish, a “student of the skies” but also a “connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,” overate and had the nightmare related in the central section of the poem, written— unusually for HPL—in Miltonic blank verse (whose Greek title, “Aletheia Phrikodes,” means “the frightful truth”). Here Lucullus is taken by a nameless guide on a voyage through the universe and shown the insignificance of humanity within the boundless reaches of space and time. Horrified, Languish wakes up and (in a resumption of the rhyming couplets) resolves never to mix food and poetry again.