"I am the emperor of dreams"

I can think of no better way to commemorate the 129th anniversary of the birth of Clark Ashton Smith than to quote, as I will below, the first stanza from his 1922 poem, "The Hashish Eater (or The Apocalypse of Evil)." This is likely Smith's most famous poem, written nearly a decade before his name first appeared in the pages of Weird Tales. Smith, one must recall, began his literary career as a poet, the protégé of George Sterling. Likewise, in the years following the deaths of both his friend, H.P. Lovecraft, and his parents, Smith abandoned fiction entirely to returned to poetry, a pursuit that, along with sculpture, occupied him for the remainder of his life. Smith wrote fiction to pay the bills, but it was poetry that mattered most to him, hence my decision to mark his birthday with this excerpt.
***
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;I crown me with the million-colored sunOf secret worlds incredible, and takeTheir trailing skies for vestment when I soar,Throned on the mounting zenith, and illumeThe spaceward-flown horizons infinite.Like rampant monsters roaring for their glut,The fiery-crested oceans rise and rise,By jealous moons maleficently urgedTo follow me for ever; mountains hornedWith peaks of sharpest adamant, and mawedWith sulphur-lit volcanoes lava-langued,Usurp the skies with thunder, but in vain;And continents of serpent-shapen trees,With slimy trunks that lengthen league by league,Pursue my flight through ages spurned to fireBy that supreme ascendance; sorcerers,And evil kings, predominantly armedWith scrolls of fulvous dragon-skin whereonAre worm-like runes of ever-twisting flame,Would stay me; and the sirens of the stars,With foam-like songs from silver fragrance wrought,Would lure me to their crystal reefs; and moonsWhere viper-eyed, senescent devils dwell,With antic gnomes abominably wise,Heave up their icy horns across my way.But naught deters me from the goal ordainedBy suns and eons and immortal wars,And sung by moons and motes; the goal whose nameIs all the secret of forgotten glyphsBy sinful gods in torrid rubies writFor ending of a brazen book; the goalWhereat my soaring ecstasy may standIn amplest heavens multiplied to holdMy hordes of thunder-vested avatars,And Promethèan armies of my thought,That brandish claspèd levins. There I callMy memories, intolerably cladIn light the peaks of paradise may wear,And lead the Armageddon of my dreamsWhose instant shout of triumph is becomeImmensity's own music: for their feetAre founded on innumerable worlds,Remote in alien epochs, and their armsUpraised, are columns potent to exaltWith ease ineffable the countless thronesOf all the gods that are or gods to be,And bear the seats of Asmodai and SetAbove the seventh paradise.