A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Lovecraft does not seem to have returned to Slater Avenue until the 1902–03 school year. During the interim he was, as before, left to satisfy his intellectual curiosity in his own way: his family could hardly have failed to see that the boy was naturally bookish and did not need much incentive to investigate any subject that caught his fancy.

Lovecraft states that he discovered W. Frank Russell’s The Frozen Pirate (1887), a lurid and histrionic novel about Antarctica, at the age of eight or nine, and that it impelled him to write some weird tales based on the same theme. It seems likely that this novel— along, perhaps, with the scarcely less histrionic but more artistically finished Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe— helped to inspire Lovecraft’s interest in geography, particularly the Antarctic, an interest that led not merely to several works of fiction both early and late but several works of nonfiction as well.

Lovecraft on various occasions states that his interest in Antarctica began either in 1900 or in 1902. I am inclined to accept the earlier date, for in an early letter he goes on to say: ‘The Borchgrevink expedition, which had just made a new record in South Polar achievement, greatly stimulated this study.’³² The Norwegian Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink’s great achievement was to have established the first camp on actual Antarctic soil. He had sailed from England in August 1898, established the camp in February 1899, stayed all through the long Antarctic night (May– July 1899), walked on the Ross Ice Shelf on 19 February 1900, and returned to England in the summer of 1900.

It is not surprising that Lovecraft’s interest would have been aroused by the Borchgrevink expedition, for this was the first important Antarctic voyage since the 1840s. It is also for this reason that two of the three lost treatises on Antarctic exploration which Lovecraft wrote around this time—Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N. (1902), Wilkes’s Explorations (1902), and Antarctic Atlas (1903)³³—discuss those 1840s expeditions: there were no others in recent memory that he could have written about. In fact, I am wondering whether the dates of writing supplied (in 1936) by Lovecraft are entirely accurate: I would like to date them to an even earlier period, say 1900. The first two of these treatises must have treated the nearly simultaneous expeditions of the American Charles Wilkes (1838– 40), who named the continent, and the Englishman James Clark Ross (1839–41), for whom the Ross Ice Shelf is named.

It would seem odd for Lovecraft not to have chosen to write up the expeditions by Borchgrevink and also Robert Scott (1901–02), so fresh as they would have been in his mind, rather than the expeditions of the 1840s, some of whose discoveries had been superseded by the work of these later explorers. His correspondent C. L. Moore actually saw a copy of Wilkes’s Explorations in late 1936,³⁴ although it was not found among his papers after his death a few months later. Antarctic Atlas must have been an interesting work, and presumably consisted largely of a map of the continent; but so little exploration of the land mass had been done by this time that large parts of it were still unknown and unnamed.

Lovecraft reports in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ that ‘my pompous “book” called Poemata Minora, written when I was eleven, was dedicated “To the Gods, Heroes, and Ideals of the Ancients”, and harped in disillusioned, world-weary tones on the sorrow of the pagan robbed of his antique pantheon’. Poemata Minora, Volume II is Lovecraft’s most finished and aesthetically satisfying juvenile work. The five poems bear comparison with any of his later verse, although this is an indication not so much of the merit of these early poems as of the mediocrity of his later ones.

The poems in Poemata Minora reveal considerable originality, and few can be traced to any specific works of classical poetry. Lovecraft was endlessly fond of citing the fourth and final stanza of ‘Ode to Selene or Diana’ as prototypical of his disharmony with the modern age:

Take heed, Diana, of my humble plea.

Convey me where my happiness may last. Draw me against the tide of time’s rough sea And let my spirit rest amid the past.