The work is perhaps HPL’s first enunciation of cosmicism, predating even his early stories (e.g., “Dagon”). In later years HPL found the rhymed framework dissatisfying, thinking that it detracted from the seriousness of the cosmic message; accordingly, when R.H.Barlow was contemplating issuing HPL’s collected verse, HPL instructed Barlow to omit that part. HPL revised a small part of the blank verse section (“Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck…”) and included it in “May Skies” ([Providence] Evening News,May 1, 1917).
See R.Boerem, “A Lovecraftian Nightmare” (in FDOC).
“Poetry and the Gods.”
Short story (2,540 words); written in collaboration with Anna Helen Crofts, probably in the summer of 1920. First published in the United Amateur(September 1920) (as by “Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe”); first collected in The Lovecraft Collectors Library,Volume 1 (1952); corrected text in D.
Marcia is a young woman who, though “outwardly a typical product of modern civilisation,” feels strangely out of tune with her time. She picks up a magazine and reads a piece of free verse, finding it so evocative that she lapses into a languid dream in which Hermes comes to her and wafts her to Parnassus where Zeus is holding court. She is shown six individuals sitting before the Corycian cave; they are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Keats. “These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.” Zeus tells
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Marcia that she will meet a man who is “our latest-born messenger,” a man whose poetry will somehow bring order to the chaos of the modern age. She later meets this person, “the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world,” and he thrills her with his poetry.
Nothing is known about the origin of this story (which HPL never mentions in any extant correspondence) nor about HPL’s coauthor, aside from the fact that she resided at 343 West Main Street in North Adams, Mass., in the far northwestern corner of the state. Probably the impetus for writing the story came from Crofts; she may also have written the tidbits of free verse in the story, since HPL despised free verse (and actually comments in the story that “It was only a bit of vers fibre,that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers…”). The prose of the rest of the story appears to be HPL’s.
Poetry, Lovecraft’s.
HPL wrote more than 250 poems from 1897 to 1936. The great majority of these were written in imitation of the occasional verse of Dryden and Pope, with extensive use of the heroic couplet. In 1914 HPL, responding to Maurice W.Moe’s urging to vary his metrical style, wrote: “Take the form away, and nothing remains. I have no real poetic ability, and all that saves my verse from utter worthlessness is the care which I bestow on its metrical construction” ( SL1.3–4). HPL’s devotion to verse may perhaps have been augmented by his mother, who reportedly considered him a “poet of the highest order” ( LR16). Accordingly, for at least the first seven years of his mature literary period (1914–21), HPL attempted to achieve mastery in verse.
HPL’s surviving juvenile poetry consists largely of imitations or translations of Greek and Latin epics, although one specimen, “H.Lovecraft’s Attempted Journey betwixt Providence & Fall River…” (1901), is a delightful comic poem on a modern theme—his initial ride on an electric trolley. Other early work is marred by racist sentiments (“De Triumpho Naturae” [1905]; “New-England Fallen” [1912]; “On the Creation of Niggers” [1912]). His first published poem, “Providence in 2000 A.D.” ([Providence] Evening Bulletin,March 4, 1912), is a satire directed against Italian-American residents in his native city.
HPL’s entry into amateur journalism in 1914 was triggered by his writing of several pungent satires in the Augustan mode published in the Argosy(1913–14). In the amateur press, he found ready venues for a great quantity of his verse. The poems fall roughly into a variety of nonexclusive categories: occasional verse, seasonal and topographical poems, poems on amateur affairs, political poems, satires, and (beginning in 1916) weird poetry. On the whole, only the last two categories reveal consistent competence. Some of the satires are themselves on political subjects (e.g., “To General Villa” [ Blarney Stone,November–December 1914]) or on amateur affairs (e.g., “On a Modern Lothario” [ Blarney-Stone,July–August 1914]). His first separately published work was the poem The Crime of Crimes(1915), on the sinking of the Lusitania
HPL wrote poetry with great facility. He noted that the ten-line poem “On Receiving a Picture of Swans” took about ten minutes to compose ( SL1.13). “A Mississippi Autumn” ( Ole Miss’,December 1915) was signed “Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Metrical Mechanic.” HPL had no illusions as to the quality of much of
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his verse. In 1918, after making an exhaustive list of his published poems, he noted: “What a mess of mediocre & miserable junk. He hath sharp eyes indeed, who can discover any trace of merit in so worthless an array of bad verse” ( SL1.60).
HPL’s weird verse does, however, deserve some special attention, if only because it comprises an interesting appendage to his weird fiction. “The Poe-et’s Nightmare” (1916) is one of the earliest expressions of his distinctive brand of cosmicism, speaking apocalyptically in blank verse: “Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck/Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken/Which mortals call the boundless universe.” Many other poems are metrical and stylistic imitations of Poe’s verse: “The Rutted Road” (1917); “Nemesis” (1917); “The Eidolon” (1918); “Despair” (1919); “The House” (1919); “The City” (1919). “Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme” (1917–18) is a long poem on the werewolf theme; HPL curiously included it in several lists of his prose tales. Later verse begins to show greater distinctiveness and originality, such as the pungent “The Cats” (1925) and the pensive “Primavera” (1925) and “The Wood” (1929). In late 1929, after several years in which he wrote relatively little verse, HPL experienced a remarkable outburst of poetic inspiration, producing “The Outpost,” “The Ancient Track,” the flawless sonnet “The Messenger,” and the sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth(1929–30) in short order. After several more years of quiescence, HPL produced finely crafted sonnets to Virgil Finlay and Clark Ashton Smith in late 1936.
Of the satires, “Gryphus in Asinum Mutatus” (1915) is an amusing take-off of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; “Ye Ballade of Patrick von Flynn” (1915) is a skewering of Irish-Americans’ support of Germany during World War I; “The Isaacsonio-Mortoniad” (1915) is a long and piquant send-up of Charles D.Isaacson and James F.Morton, who had attacked HPL in the amateur press; and “The Dead Bookworm” (1917) and “On the Death of a Rhyming Critic” (1917) are delightful parodies of himself. In a letter to Alfred Galpin (August 21, 1918) HPL wrote several satires of love poetry, as he had done earlier with “Laeta; a Lament” (1915). “Amissa Minerva” (1919) is a sharp attack on modern poetry, with several poets cited by name. HPL’s most unrestrained satire is “Medusa: A Portrait” (1921), a vicious lampoon of Ida C.Haughton, an amateur writer with whom HPL was feuding. But his greatest satire departs as completely as possible from the Augustan mode: “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance” (1922?), a parody of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land,written entirely in free verse. His satiric poetry was the theme of the first critical article on HPL’s verse, Rheinhart Kleiner’s “A Note on Howard P.Lovecraft’s Verse” ( United Amateur,March 1919).