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

Two facets of Lovecraft’s poetry that must be passed over in merciful brevity are his classical imitations and his philosophical poetry. Lovecraft seemed endlessly fond of producing flaccid imitations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—his first poetic love, let us recall—including such things as ‘Hylas and Myrrha: A Tale’ (Tryout, May 1919), ‘Myrrha and Strephon’ (Tryout, July 1919), and several others. Of the early philosophical poetry, only a few are notable. ‘Inspiration’ (Conservative, October 1916) is a delicate two-stanza poem on literary inspiration coming to a writer at an unexpected moment. It is of importance largely because it is the very first piece of professionally published poetry by Lovecraft outside of local newspaper appearances: it was reprinted in the National Magazine of Boston in November 1916. Lovecraft had a number of poems printed in this magazine over the next several years.

As the years passed, it became evident to Lovecraft’s readers in the amateur press (as it was always evident to Lovecraft himself) that in his poetry he was a self-consciously antiquated fossil with admirable technical skill but no real poetic feeling. Eventually Lovecraft began to poke fun at himself on this score, as in ‘On the Death of a Rhyming Critic’ (Toledo Amateur, July 1917) and ‘The Dead Bookworm’ (United Amateur, September 1919).

This brings us to Lovecraft’s satiric poetry, which not only ranges over a very wide array of subject matter but is clearly the only facet of his poetry aside from his weird verse that is of any account. Kleiner made this point in ‘A Note on Howard P. Lovecraft’s Verse’ (United Amateur, March 1919), the first critical article on Lovecraft:

Many who cannot read his longer and more ambitious productions find Mr. Lovecraft’s light or humorous verse decidedly refreshing. As a satirist along familiar lines, particularly those laid down by Butler, Swift and Pope, he is most himself—paradoxical as it seems. In reading his satires one cannot help but feel the zest with which the author has composed them. They are admirable for the way in which they reveal the depth and intensity of Mr. Lovecraft’s convictions, while the wit, irony, sarcasm and humour to be found in them serve as an indication of his powers as a controversialist. The almost relentless ferocity of his satires is constantly relieved by an attendant broad humour which has the merit of causing the reader to chuckle more than once in the perusal of some attack levelled against the particular person or policy which may have incurred Mr. Lovecraft’s displeasure.

This analysis is exactly on target. Lovecraft himself remarked in 1921: ‘Whatever merriment I have is always derived from the satirical principle.’⁷

Literary faults or literary modernism (much the same thing to Lovecraft at this time) are also the target of many satires. When Charles D. Isaacson in his amateur journal In a Minor Key championed Walt Whitman as the ‘Greatest American Thinker’, Lovecraft responded with a sizzling rebuttal in prose entitled ‘In a Major Key’ (Conservative, July 1915) in which he included an untitled poem on Whitman:

Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line

Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever’d fancy shuns the measur’d place, And copies Ovid’s filth without his grace.

And so on. Whitman was the perfect anathema for Lovecraft at this time, not only in his scornful abandonment of traditional metre but in his frank discussions of both homosexual and heterosexual sex.

Lovecraft’s greatest poem in this regard is ‘Amissa Minerva’ (Toledo Amateur, May 1919). Steven J. Mariconda has written a thorough commentary on this poem, and has illuminated many of its distinctive features.⁸ After supplying a highly encapsulated history of poetry from Homer to Swinburne, Lovecraft launches upon a systematic attack on modern poetry, mentioning Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and others by name. The subject matter of modern poetry offends Lovecraft (‘Exempt from wit, each dullard pours his ink / In odes to bathtubs, or the kitchen sink’) as much as its abandonment of traditional rhyme and metre.