Novr. 27 Dear C A S:— I received both your letter & the Overland with a great deal of pleasure. I don’t yet know whether or not the latter is to be returned—if it is, I can assure you that the copy remains safe & secure awaiting instructions. Sterling certainly proves his worth & fascination …
Continue reading Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, 27 November 1927
Providence, R.I., December 11, 1919 BELLS I hear the bells from yon imposing tower; The bells of Yuletide o’er a troubled night; Pealing with mock’ry in a dismal hour Upon a world upheav’d with greed and fright. Their mellow tones on myriad roofs resound; A million restless souls attend the chime; Yet falls their …
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all …
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories …
“Deteriores omnes sumus licentia.” —Terence. Of the various forms of decadence manifest in the poetical art of the present age, none strikes more harshly on our sensibilities than the alarming decline in that harmonious regularity of metre which adorned the poetry of our immediate ancestors. That metre itself forms an essential part of all true …
In a former article our readers have been shewn the fundamental sources of literary inspiration, and the leading prerequisites to expression. It remains to furnish hints concerning expression itself—its forms, customs, and technicalities—in order that the young writer may lose nothing of force or charm in presenting his ideas to the public. Grammar A review …
Among the many and complex tendencies observable in modern poetry, or what answers for poetry in this age, is a decided but unjust scorn of the honest old pastoral, immortalised by Theocritus and Virgil, and revived in our own literature by Spenser. Nor is this unfavourable attitude confined alone to the formal eclogue whose classical …
Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in the Blue Pencil Club—a new thing for your circle, perhaps, though not unfamiliar to amateurdom as a whole—I cannot resist contributing a few Thomasic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the dispute, though conscious that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely have …
To those who look beneath the surface, the present universal war drives home more than one anthropological truth in striking fashion; and of these verities none is more profound than that relating to the essential immutability of mankind and its instincts. Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain biological …
“Sed ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis Offendar maculis.” —Horace. The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the …
The Works of H.P. Lovecraft 