Customer Reviews

The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft

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Absolutely amazing! I had no Idea Lovecraft had written so much poetry! 557 pages in length. Divided into 10 parts. juvenillia(poetry written as achild or just getting started in poetry),fantasy and horror(my favorite),occasional verse,satire,seasonal and topographical,amateur affairs,politics and society,personal,alfredo a tragedy( a play by lovecraft),and fragments. Very thorough. A must for the Lovecraft purist and collector.

The three titans of WEIRD TALES, Clarke Ashton Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard, all wrote verse but only Ashton Smith was taken seriously as a poet by the contemporary literary establishment. Howard's manly Kiplingesque verse was written largely for his own amusement, and HPL's was almost entirely confined to his days of activity in the Amateur Press movement (1914-22).

Most of HPL's verse is in an archaic, highly artifical late 18th Century or "Georgian" mode, which he had come to love from the books he found in his grandfather's library as a child. He sometimes writes in the manner of Poe, but almost always to parody. Actually, his most effective verse, like "Fungi from Yuggoth," is in the sonnet form--- a form he rarely used. Editor Joshi says this is "complete," and he means it, down to birthday card inscriptions and one or two line fragments found among HPL's papers. But this almost guarantees a low average of literary quality and interest. Most educated men in the early 19th Century composed verses on occasion. I have seen a photo of Einstein playing violin with a father and son on piano and violin. Einstein inscribed the photo (in German), "Here's to the father and his lad. Our music was--- not bad!" Imagine someone collecting all such Einsteinian greetings and publishing them as THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF EINSTEIN. Einstein would be horrified, and so should you be. Should we be equally horrified by this book, which is not so different? I think not, because HPL is an important literary figure, and after all some of the material collected herein is seriously intended--- but not much.

A lot of the verse consists of gentle kidding of friends in the AP movement, particularly HPL's teenage buddy Alfred Galpin. There is even a mock-Elizabethan blank verse play in which Galpin and other figures of the AP have prominent roles, including HPL himself. One of the most astonishing of these works is "Medusa: A Portrait," several pages of inventive vituperation aimed at a female enemy of HPL's.

Most readers will spend most of their time with HPL's "Fantasy and Horror" verse, which takes up about 60 pages of this mammoth 557-page time. Given the interest many rock musicians take in HPL it is surprising more of this material has not been set to music. A quick search of the Internet did reveal some posted MP3s of precisely such--- I didn't sample them but did notice the titles chosen were often the ones I'd also have chosen for that purpose.

This is a book to keep by the side of the bed and read a few pages in every time cats get you up to be let in or out, or a loud jalopy going by jolts you awake. I think that's about the only way to get through it.