Customer Reviews

Collected Poems

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Although I have already order'd this book -- purchasing ye copy own'd by that modern genius of weird phantasy, Thomas Ligotti, who was selling it here at Amazon -- I am tempted, nigh, to purchase it again, as at this moment it is being offer'd for a very low price. Although I am not a collector of rare books, there has always been something magical about Arkham House titles -- the look, the feel, the aura of their books is very real -- and then ye contents is always so delicious. This is a wonderful (if, at times, poorly edited) edition of Lovecraft's best poetry, and the illustrations by Frank Utpatel are wonderful.

Here is the book's foreword, by August Derleth:

"The best of H. P. Lovecraft's poetry is only a minor portion of his work, but it is filled with echoes of his fiction and is clearly related to it. The best of it is, of course, the FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH. PSYCHOPOMPOS, and a few lesser poems written in the 1928-1932 period during which he did so much of his most successful creative work. The best is here, and some of the second-best, and some examples of that very early work--which represents, in fact, the bulk of Lovecraft's verse, a bulk that is not collected here because, as Winfield Townley Scott observed in a brief essay on Lovecraft as a poet, it is 'eighteenth century rubbish.' It may be quaint at first reading, it may amuse, but in the mass it is indeed painfully dull, and one can only wonder that anyone, even if only to entertain himself, should have devoted so many pages to this kind of imitative verse when he might much more fruitfully have been setting down more of those macabre stories for which Lovecraft did ultimately achieve the small fame which is rightfully his.

Lovecraft's influences, as Scott has pointed out, were manifest--Thomas Gray, James Thomson, Poe--and perhaps, in his best verse, Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose SONNETS appeared in book form only a relatively short time before Lovecraft undertook the writing of the FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH, THE MESSENGER, and those related poems marking his most creative period in poetry. As horror poetry designed to send a shiver or two up its reader's spines, the best of Lovecraft's verse is eminently successful, even if, as poetry seen against the vast panorama of verse today and yesterday it has little significance.

The illustrations accompanying these poems are the work of the first artist to illustrate Lovecraft's fiction in book form; a hiatus of 27 years separates THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH from COLLECTED POEMS, and in that interval Frank Utpatel has established himself as an exacting master of the wood-engraving. In these illustrations Utpatel proves himself a skilled interpreter of Lovecraft's poems and adds to them a dimension not readily achieved by type alone.

--AUGUST DERLETH,

Sauk City, Wisconsin

September 27, 1962"

How queer of Derleth to be almost dismissive of much of the best poetry; for the "Fungi from Yuggoth" sonnet cycle is so much more than horror poetry:

BACKGROUND

I never can be tied to raw, new things,

For I first saw the light in an old town,

Where from my windows huddled roofs sloped down

To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.

Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams

Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,

And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes--

These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.

Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,

Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths

That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths

Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.

They cut the moment's thongs and leave me free

To stand alone before eternity.

Lovecraft's complete poetry was collected by S. T. Joshi for THE ANCIENT TRACK (Night Shade Books, 2001), and yet this slim edition from Arkham House has a magnificent charm all its own. Arkham House books shew us that, however limited Derleth may have been as an interpreter of Lovecraft or as a writer of inventive Cthulhu Mythos fiction, as an editor he soared supreme. He gave us Arkham House, and for that we cheer his memory.