An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Short story (1,720 words); written probably in the summer of 1928. First published in O-Wash-TaNong(January 1938); rpt. Phantagraph(June 1940); first collected in Uncollected Prose and Poetry II(1980); corrected text in MW

In this “biography” of the celebrated Ibidus, the author is careful to point out that his masterpiece was not, as is sometimes believed, the Lives of the Poetsbut in fact the famous “ Op. Cit.wherein all the significant undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for all.” Ibid was born in 486 and taught rhetoric in Rome. His fortunes were mixed during the succession of barbarian invasions in Italy, and by 541 he had moved to Constantinople. He died in 587, but his remains later were exhumed and his skull began a long series of peregrinations and ended up—by way of Charlemagne, Alcuin, William the Conqueror, Oliver Cromwell, and others—in the New World, specifically in Salem, Mass., then in Providence, and finally in Milwaukee, where it rolled down into the burrow of a prairie-dog, only to be brought back to earth by a convulsion of Nature. HPL on one occasion dated this sketch to 1927 (see HPL to Maurice W.Moe, January 19, [1931]; AHT), but the first mention of it is in a letter by Moe to HPL dated August 3, 1928, so a date of 1928 seems more probable. The story was either included in a letter to Moe or was a separate enclosure in a letter to him; its epigraph (“‘…As Ibid says in his famous Lives of the Poets.’—From a student theme”) may refer to an actual statement from a paper by one of Moe’s students. HPL uses this real or fabricated piece of fatuity as the springboard for an exquisite tongue-in-cheek squib with numerous in-jokes (particularly in relation to HPL’s residence in Providence and Moe’s in Milwaukee). The target of the satire in “Ibid” is not so much the follies of students as the pomposity of academic scholarship. It is full of learned but preposterous footnotes and owlish references to real and fabricated historical events. Moe considered submitting the sketch to the American Mercuryor some such journal and asked

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HPL to revise it slightly; but later he and HPL concluded that revision for a commercial magazine was not possible and that the work “would have to be content with private circulation” (Maurice W.Moe to HPL, January 29, 1931; ms., JHL).

“Idealism and Materialism—A Reflection.”

Essay (4,310 words); written in 1919/20/21. First published in the National Amateur(“July 1919”); rpt. MW

Forceful essay presenting an anthropology of religion (derived largely from Nietzsche and from John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers[1872]), asserting that religious belief is a holdover from primitive times in which human beings invented gods as a means of explaining natural phenomena, the causes of which they did not understand. HPL mentions his “seeing” a dryad in the woods near his home at the age of seven or eight, an anecdote repeated in “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922). Its date of composition is unknown: the July 1919 National Amateurwas long delayed and did not appear until the summer of 1921; as the issue also contained HPL’s “The Picture in the House” (December 1920), the essay could have been written in 1920 or early 1921.

“In a Major Key.”

Essay (1,050 words); probably written in the summer of 1915. First published in the Conservative (July 1915); rpt. MW

A response to Charles D.Isaacson’s In a Minor Keythat seeks to refute Isaacson’s claims that Walt Whitman is a great American thinker and poet, that race prejudice is an unmitigated evil, and that pacifism is a morally upright stance to take in the face of the European war. The essay contains an untitled poem (18 lines), which in a letter HPL titled “Fragment on Whitman” ( SL1.57), condemning the sexual elements in Whitman’s poetry.

“In a Sequestered Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d.”

Acrostic poem (13 lines); written on August 8, 1936. First published in Four Acrostic Sonnets on Edgar Allan Poe(1936); rpt. Science-Fantasy Correspondent(March– April 1937; as “In a Sequestered Churchyard Where Once Poe Walked”); HPL(Bellville, N.J.: Corwin F.Stickney, 1937); WT(May 1938) (as “Where Poe Once Walked”).