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

No publication has been found for this poem. The text survives, however, in a hectographed copy, which suggests that Lovecraft may at least have passed this poem around to friends or family; it is likely that they approved—or at least did not object—to his sentiments.

A somewhat more innocuous poem is ‘Quinsnicket Park’, which Lovecraft dates to 1913. Quinsnicket Park (now called Lincoln Woods Park) is situated four miles north of Providence, and was one of Lovecraft’s favourite sylvan retreats; throughout his life he would walk there and read or write in the open air. His 117-line paean to this rustic haven is trite, wooden, and mechanical.

We do not know much else about Lovecraft’s specific activities during these years. It is likely that he sequestered himself in his study and read enormous quanitites of books, whether it be science or belles lettres; it was probably at this time that he laid the foundations for that later erudition in so many fields which astounded his colleagues. No doubt he continued to read weird fiction also.

One specific type of fiction we know Lovecraft read in great quantities was the work contained in the early Munsey magazines. It is a point of debate whether the various magazines founded by Frank A. Munsey are or are not to be considered pulp magazines; for our purposes it will suffice to say that they were significant forerunners of the pulp magazines and form a natural chain of continuity in popular magazine fiction from the dime and nickel novels of the later nineteenth century to the genuine pulps of the 1920s. As avid a dime novel reader as Lovecraft appears to have been, it is in no way surprising that he would ultimately find the Munsey magazines a compelling if guilty pleasure. What he did not know at the time was that they would radically transform his life and his career—largely, but not uniformly, for the better.

Lovecraft mentions an article in a Munsey magazine in one of his hectographed magazines in 1903. Whether he read them continuously from this point on his unclear; but there is no gainsaying his remark in the following letter to the All-Story Weekly for 7 March 1914:

Having read every number of your magazine since its beginning in January, 1905, I feel in some measure privileged to write a few words of approbation and criticism concerning its contents.

In the present age of vulgar taste and sordid realism it is a relief to peruse a publication such as The All-Story, which has ever been and still remains under the influence of the imaginative school of Poe and Verne.

The All-Story was a companion magazine to the Argosy, which Munsey had changed to an all-fiction magazine in October 1896. Lovecraft of course read the Argosy also, as we shall presently see, although perhaps not this early. Lovecraft in 1916 states a little sheepishly that ‘In 1913 I had formed the reprehensible habit of picking up cheap magazines like The Argosy to divert my mind from the tedium of reality’,³¹ but it is now evident that this is, at the very least, an equivocation as far as the All-Story is concerned. One further bit of evidence is the fact that full-page advertisements for the International Correspondence Schools regularly appear in the Argosy, and it is very likely from this source that Lovecraft learned of this organization and used its services around 1909. He also read the Popular Magazine (Street & Smith’s rival to the Argosy) about the period 1905–10.

What was the fascination of these magazines for Lovecraft? The letter quoted above supplies a part of the answer: they contained a significant amount of horror, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction—material that was already ceasing to appear in the standard ‘slick’ or literary magazines of the day. As Lovecraft states in 1932: ‘In general … the Munsey publications did more to publish weird fiction than any other magazine enterprise of the early 20th century.’³² Elsewhere he remarks that he ‘first began to notice’³³ the Black Cat (1895–1922) around 1904, and that that magazine and the All-Story ‘were the first source of contemporary weird material I ever stumbled on’.³⁴

The letter-column of the Argosy—entitled ‘The Log-Book’—had been established only in the February 1911 issue, and letters were initially slow to come in; but by the end of the year many letters (identified only by the initials of the writer and his or her city of residence) were being published, with running commentary by the editor. Lovecraft’s first published letter to the Munsey magazines appeared in the Argosy for November 1911.³⁵ His next letter, in the 8 February 1913 issue of the All-Story Cavalier, is a comment on Irvin S. Cobb’s magnificent tale of a half-man, half-fish hybrid, ‘Fishhead’.