By G. W. Thomas
H. P. Lovecraft and his two closest Mythos-writing friends, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, all wrote poetry. It’s what people who were born around the turn of the century did. Remember that there weren’t any video games or TV mini-series in those days. People actually read poetry in books and magazines. So, it shouldn’t be any surprise that there is Mythos poetry. Descended from Edgar Allan Poe, HPL’s greatest model, Mythos poetry is dark, usually rhymed, and meant to invoke a chill or create a fantastic vision. Just like Poe’s “City Beneath the Sea”:
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
Lovecraft spent much of his time discussing poetics which correspondents like the poet Samuel Loveman and in amateur circles through APAs (Amateur Press Associations – these were small collections made by contributors who received a copy as payment). Lovecraft’s poetry has been largely overshadowed by his fiction, though his epic-length, “Fungi from Yuggoth”, is a staggering piece, in length if not depth.
“The Howler” (from “The Fungi From Yuggoth”)
Stopping a while to watch the fading day,
I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,
When through the ivied panes one sunset ray
Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.
Clark Ashton Smith was a poet before he was a Pulpster. He began in the salons of San Francisco as protégé to George Sterling. His poetry book, Ebony & Crystal, was published in 1922, eight years before his first Pulp tale, “Sadastor”, (Weird Tales, July 1930). Smith’s poetic sense can be found in his fiction, as well, often creating a dream-like feel that isn’t reliant on logic.
“Averoigne”
In Averoigne the enchantress weaves
Weird spells that cast a changeling sun,
From the sepulchral regions dark,
To abide on ivy blackened towers
Whose fungi mottled castles have
Time’s phantoms for their seneschal.
REH is best remembered as the creator of Conan, but he was as much a poet as he was a Pulpster. He sold 35 poems to Weird Tales and 55 stories. His stories occasionally contain verse within them such as “Men of the Shadows”. His poetic use of language can even be found in his prose which is often admired for its speed and action but skillfully uses colorful language and details to paint in the background and allows that action to take place sooner.
“Cimmeria”
It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
What I like best in Mythos poetry, whether writing it or reading it, is either a narrative that tells a creepy tale or a mood piece (rhyme, free verse or prose is unimportant), a vision of darkness and sparkling evil. Either of which will create the dark images in my mind that will resonate inside long after I have read them. Clever word play, while enjoyable while reading, rarely lasts long. It is the scene from the darkness that makes me want to know more that satisfies.
Mythos poetry is innately Romantic (not Harlequin Romance, kiss-kiss, but Romantic in the John Keats-Samuel Coleridge sense). The poet wishes to create a landscape that is both dark and fantastic, chilling and sweetly wondrous. It is this same sense of Romance that the best Sword & Sorcery fiction captures. Not surprising, one of these poets, Robert E. Howard, created that sub-genre, and Clark Ashton Smith, wrote something similar but not quite the same in fiction. This desire to pen poetry written in blood may have best been best described by Howard in his poem “The Poets” (Weird Tales, April 1938). I attempted likewise in my own verse:
Lament
I start a poem of jolly fancy
Only to see the spears of fear
Grow out of the laughing bodies
Soon a corpse field
Soon a moldering grave
Why no sunshine inside
My desolate heart?
My pen is dipped in blood.