An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

One of HPL’s longest poems, and perhaps his most ambitious single weird poem. It recounts (in rhyming couplets) how Lucullus Languish, a “student of the skies” but also a “connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,” overate and had the nightmare related in the central section of the poem, written— unusually for HPL—in Miltonic blank verse (whose Greek title, “Aletheia Phrikodes,” means “the frightful truth”). Here Lucullus is taken by a nameless guide on a voyage through the universe and shown the insignificance of humanity within the boundless reaches of space and time. Horrified, Languish wakes up and (in a resumption of the rhyming couplets) resolves never to mix food and poetry again.

The work is perhaps HPL’s first enunciation of cosmicism, predating even his early stories (e.g., “Dagon”). In later years HPL found the rhymed framework dissatisfying, thinking that it detracted from the seriousness of the cosmic message; accordingly, when R.H.Barlow was contemplating issuing HPL’s collected verse, HPL instructed Barlow to omit that part. HPL revised a small part of the blank verse section (“Alone in space, I view’d a feeble fleck…”) and included it in “May Skies” ([Providence] Evening News,May 1, 1917).

See R.Boerem, “A Lovecraftian Nightmare” (in FDOC).

“Poetry and the Gods.”

Short story (2,540 words); written in collaboration with Anna Helen Crofts, probably in the summer of 1920. First published in the United Amateur(September 1920) (as by “Anna Helen Crofts and Henry Paget-Lowe”); first collected in The Lovecraft Collectors Library,Volume 1 (1952); corrected text in D.

Marcia is a young woman who, though “outwardly a typical product of modern civilisation,” feels strangely out of tune with her time. She picks up a magazine and reads a piece of free verse, finding it so evocative that she lapses into a languid dream in which Hermes comes to her and wafts her to Parnassus where Zeus is holding court. She is shown six individuals sitting before the Corycian cave; they are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and Keats. “These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men.” Zeus tells

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Marcia that she will meet a man who is “our latest-born messenger,” a man whose poetry will somehow bring order to the chaos of the modern age. She later meets this person, “the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world,” and he thrills her with his poetry.

Nothing is known about the origin of this story (which HPL never mentions in any extant correspondence) nor about HPL’s coauthor, aside from the fact that she resided at 343 West Main Street in North Adams, Mass., in the far northwestern corner of the state. Probably the impetus for writing the story came from Crofts; she may also have written the tidbits of free verse in the story, since HPL despised free verse (and actually comments in the story that “It was only a bit of vers fibre,that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers…”). The prose of the rest of the story appears to be HPL’s.

Poetry, Lovecraft’s.

HPL wrote more than 250 poems from 1897 to 1936. The great majority of these were written in imitation of the occasional verse of Dryden and Pope, with extensive use of the heroic couplet. In 1914 HPL, responding to Maurice W.Moe’s urging to vary his metrical style, wrote: “Take the form away, and nothing remains. I have no real poetic ability, and all that saves my verse from utter worthlessness is the care which I bestow on its metrical construction” ( SL1.3–4). HPL’s devotion to verse may perhaps have been augmented by his mother, who reportedly considered him a “poet of the highest order” ( LR16). Accordingly, for at least the first seven years of his mature literary period (1914–21), HPL attempted to achieve mastery in verse.

HPL’s surviving juvenile poetry consists largely of imitations or translations of Greek and Latin epics, although one specimen, “H.Lovecraft’s Attempted Journey betwixt Providence & Fall River…” (1901), is a delightful comic poem on a modern theme—his initial ride on an electric trolley. Other early work is marred by racist sentiments (“De Triumpho Naturae” [1905]; “New-England Fallen” [1912]; “On the Creation of Niggers” [1912]). His first published poem, “Providence in 2000 A.D.” ([Providence] Evening Bulletin,March 4, 1912), is a satire directed against Italian-American residents in his native city.