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The Book of Jade
H. P. Lovecraft referred to Park Barnitz as “a vivid decadent of the fin de siècle period who modelled his verse on Baudelaire & killed himself soon after graduation from Harvard.” His one and only volume, The Book of Jade (1901), has become a legend in the realm of weird poetry, its technical precision and its relentless obsession with death, horror, madness, and pessimism making it a choice prize for appreciators of poetic witchery.
But almost nothing is known about its young author, who died at the age of twenty-three. This comprehensive edition presents a wealth of material about David Park Barnitz—biographical, critical, and bibliographical. It contains the complete text of The Book of Jade along with additional poems and essays by Barnitz, some of which have never been reprinted. In addition, Gavin Callaghan has written an exhaustive biography that presents a fascinating portrait of the poet, delving into his family’s ancestry and collecting widely scattered nuggets of information on Barnitz’s life, work, and thought.
The editors have gathered a wide array of criticism on Barnitz, including contemporary reviews and early essays by Floyd Dell, Carey McWilliams, and Joseph Payne Brennan. The book concludes with a brace of original essays on Barnitz’s poetic achievement. This is the definitive edition of The Book of Jade, featuring masses of material not available elsewhere.
But almost nothing is known about its young author, who died at the age of twenty-three. This comprehensive edition presents a wealth of material about David Park Barnitz—biographical, critical, and bibliographical. It contains the complete text of The Book of Jade along with additional poems and essays by Barnitz, some of which have never been reprinted. In addition, Gavin Callaghan has written an exhaustive biography that presents a fascinating portrait of the poet, delving into his family’s ancestry and collecting widely scattered nuggets of information on Barnitz’s life, work, and thought.
The editors have gathered a wide array of criticism on Barnitz, including contemporary reviews and early essays by Floyd Dell, Carey McWilliams, and Joseph Payne Brennan. The book concludes with a brace of original essays on Barnitz’s poetic achievement. This is the definitive edition of The Book of Jade, featuring masses of material not available elsewhere.
330 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1901
8 people are currently reading
185 people want to read
About the author
David Park Barnitz
1 book3 followersH. P. Lovecraft referred to Park Barnitz as “a vivid decadent of the fin de siècle period who modelled his verse on Baudelaire & killed himself soon after graduation from Harvard.” His one and only volume, The Book of Jade (1901), has become a legend in the realm of weird poetry, its technical precision and its relentless obsession with death, horror, madness, and pessimism making it a choice prize for appreciators of poetic witchery.
Park Barnitz was a student of Sanskrit and Asian history and received an A.B. (the equivalent of a modern PhD) from Harvard in 1898. He was the youngest person ever admitted to Harvard's American Oriental Society.
Park Barnitz was a student of Sanskrit and Asian history and received an A.B. (the equivalent of a modern PhD) from Harvard in 1898. He was the youngest person ever admitted to Harvard's American Oriental Society.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
September 7, 2019
While I love poetry, I am far from qualified to analyze it in any depth. For me, getting The Book of Jade was an attempt to deepen my ability to read and dig into poetry with greater depth. Because of the breadth of this volume (all the writing contained therein that are explicitly not poetry), I feel like this was a fantastic way to take a deep dive. This is not to say that I don't appreciate (what I consider to be) good poetry - I really do love the form. But I'm just not very good at plucking out themes and some poetic subtleties like others can. That's also not to say that I don't have opinions. About half of the poems here are ones I would consider "good" poetry - and, no, I'm not even going to attempt to define "good" here. That's all subjective: I know it when I see it. Your identification of a "good" poem will likely disagree with mine. Such is art.
Barnitz opens with a dedication "To the Memory of Charles Baudelaire" - an auspicious start, before the poetry has even begun! You can do much worse than to lead with that.
I will also play the coquette (or whatever the male equivalent is) by not telling you, title-by-title, which poems I considered the best. Here, I give only a faint gloss on the poems themselves because this volume is so much more than the mere poetry.
"Sombre Sonnet" is a goth manifesto. I approve. I've always had a little goth, who hides behind my heart and peeks out occasionally - most especially when I am writing fiction. The poem's first stanza is:
I love all sombre and autumnal things,
Regal and mournful and funereal,
Things strange and curious and majestical,
Whereto a solemn savor of death clings:
This is made abundantly evident throughout. It is Barnitz's morbidity, more than anything else, that stands out to fan and critic alike.
"Nocturne" is a poem worth quoting in full. Alas, I don't have the time, stamina, or legal team to successfully transcribe this four-page-long love poem. If you have goth friends who are planning on getting married, offer to read this at their wedding, then at their respective funerals. They will not be disappointed!
If you are prone to a mid-life crisis, do not read "The House of Youth". It is not for the sentimental, nor the nostalgic, especially if guns, pills, ropes, or cutting tools are near at hand. It hurt to read that poem, which, to me means that, yes, it was good. But bad. In a good way.
My single favorite line amongst all the poems is: "Until the dead stars rot in the black sky", found in the poem "The Grave". Neither Ligotti nor Lynch could have done better. Barnitz occasionally leaves the merely decadent and rises through the dark clouds to the sublime.
"Fragments" is, ironically, the most cohesive and comprehensive poem in the entire Book of Jade. It might be Baritz's best (though I'm confident that the critiques I read disagree with me)! At eight pages, it has breadth, but does not meander. Every word is chosen carefully, and the meter escapes the sometimes-trite rhyme schemes that make some of the works in The Book of Jade seem dated and even "twee".
Barnitz also wrote essays, which are included in this volume. In the first, he utterly annihilates Rudyard Kipling in what I can only call an Anti-eulogy for the dead writer (though Kipling was not dead when this was written - Barnitz asserts that Kipling's writing was symbolically dead at the time of writing. In point of fact, Kipling outlived Barnitz, who died early either from suicide, heart failure, or drug overdose, depending on which sources you believe). Essentially, he destroy's Kipling's reputation by saying there is no reputation there worth destroying. If I were to define the word "scathing" by way of using a literary critique as an illustration, this would be the one.
Barnitz's essay "The Art of the Future"(1901) is an intriguing overview of the state of affairs in American art, music, and literature at that time. There's acknowledgement that not much is happening, but an overly-hopeful patriotic streak runs wide throughout. Barnitz is an excellent essayist, and I would have liked to have read more, even if I didn't fully agree with him or his stylistic choices.
There is a biography included, as well, which shows Barnitz to be a contrarian, plain and simple, one of those people who channels his high intelligence into focused spite. Normally, I might laud Barnitz's snarkiness toward his father, but while reading this biography, I am feeling more and more that he was just a petulant jerk of a son. It's too bad he died young, or he might have gotten over himself and proven a great contributor to dark poetry, maybe even philosophy. Middle age tends to do that to a person.
With so much happening with decadence in and around Harvard during the time Barnitz attended there, it's a wonder that we have very little direct evidence that he interacted with his poetic peers. One wonders if he was a misanthrope or even sociopathic? In any case, he died ignominiously and his work was forgotten until discovered by those who "discovered" H.P. Lovecraft, who mentions Barnitz in a couple of his letters.
Many of the contemporary reviews of The Book of Jade are damning. Most of the critiques of his work are unforgiving, merciless. If you asked the critics, it's a wonder that Barnitz was ever published at all, though I think this is an unfair assessment. Still, I've gotten in trouble on GR for writing reviews like these!
Following the reviews is a section replete with various biographical sketches and references to Barnitz. I realize that this section is meant to satisfy the completist, but I grew tired of it quickly. It's like a really, really boring phone game in which people ("scholars") perpetuate and morph errors again and again. Make it stop!
Next follows a series of essays, and this is what I consider the brain of the book (the poems themselves being the heart, of course, the previous section of biographical sketches the bowels and bladder). K.A. Opperman's essay "The Perfection of the Corpse: Necrophilia in The Book of Jade" is exactly the sort of scholarship I was hoping for in the extra material of this volume. It's a careful thematic analysis focused on one aspect of the poems that draws the subject of necrophilia to the forefront. Now, necrophilia might not be your "thing" (it's not mine, either), but the treatment of the subject is an amazing piece of scholarship, not too academic, but exacting enough that one must take it seriously.
The essay "The Grotesques: Sins Against the Afterlife" by Ashley Dioses really helps my appreciation of Barnitz's ouvre. As I've said, I'm not a good poetry analyst. I'm learning, but I'm far from erudite in this regard: a real amateur! So, it's great to read an essay like Dioses' that I can apply as I go back and reread the poems in my efforts to become better at reading poetry. I'm making progress!
If it was illustrated with cartoons, the first segment of Matt Sarraf's essay on "Barnitz and Pessimism" would read like a reverse Jack Chick tract on anti-natalism. That said, Sarraf does an excellent job of concisely laying out the philosophical war between Hegel and Schopenhauer and arguing (successfully, I think) that Barnitz based his text for the poem "Hegel" on Schopenhauer's arguments against the Hegelian view.
Chuck Caruso, in his essay "I am Weary of that Lidless Eye", gives a fantastic line-by-line analysis of Barnitz's "Mad Sonnet". He also explains Hegel's "abyss of subjectivity" quite well. But his reading of the poem "Hegel" misses the mark and his analysis of Barnitz's poems through the lens of Hegelian philosophy is strained and unconvincing. Interesting that this essay should follow after Sarraf's. Score: Sarraf +1, Caruso 0.
Gavin Callaghan's critique of Barnitz's critique of Rudyard Kipling, "Two Dead men: Park Barnitz and Rudyard Kipling" rightly points out some of the inherent hypocrisy in Barnitz's essay on Kipling. But there is a decidedly pro-conservative bent to the whole essay that becomes as derisive of Barnitz as Barnitz was derisive of Kipling. It's good to have the balance of views, but taken by itself, the essay was off-putting.
Barnitz's poems range from trite to awe-inspiring. If this volume only contained the poems, I might be wont to give it a three, possibly four-star rating. But, given the inclusion of so much scholarly material (so much that one can easily grow tired of it, honestly) of varying viewpoints, this is clearly much more than that. If you are an aficionado of decadence with an eye for scholarly criticism being bandied about, this is your book. If you are, like me, an aspiring comprehender-of-the-poetic, you would do well to pick it up and dive deep into the "loathed sty"!
Barnitz opens with a dedication "To the Memory of Charles Baudelaire" - an auspicious start, before the poetry has even begun! You can do much worse than to lead with that.
I will also play the coquette (or whatever the male equivalent is) by not telling you, title-by-title, which poems I considered the best. Here, I give only a faint gloss on the poems themselves because this volume is so much more than the mere poetry.
"Sombre Sonnet" is a goth manifesto. I approve. I've always had a little goth, who hides behind my heart and peeks out occasionally - most especially when I am writing fiction. The poem's first stanza is:
I love all sombre and autumnal things,
Regal and mournful and funereal,
Things strange and curious and majestical,
Whereto a solemn savor of death clings:
This is made abundantly evident throughout. It is Barnitz's morbidity, more than anything else, that stands out to fan and critic alike.
"Nocturne" is a poem worth quoting in full. Alas, I don't have the time, stamina, or legal team to successfully transcribe this four-page-long love poem. If you have goth friends who are planning on getting married, offer to read this at their wedding, then at their respective funerals. They will not be disappointed!
If you are prone to a mid-life crisis, do not read "The House of Youth". It is not for the sentimental, nor the nostalgic, especially if guns, pills, ropes, or cutting tools are near at hand. It hurt to read that poem, which, to me means that, yes, it was good. But bad. In a good way.
My single favorite line amongst all the poems is: "Until the dead stars rot in the black sky", found in the poem "The Grave". Neither Ligotti nor Lynch could have done better. Barnitz occasionally leaves the merely decadent and rises through the dark clouds to the sublime.
"Fragments" is, ironically, the most cohesive and comprehensive poem in the entire Book of Jade. It might be Baritz's best (though I'm confident that the critiques I read disagree with me)! At eight pages, it has breadth, but does not meander. Every word is chosen carefully, and the meter escapes the sometimes-trite rhyme schemes that make some of the works in The Book of Jade seem dated and even "twee".
Barnitz also wrote essays, which are included in this volume. In the first, he utterly annihilates Rudyard Kipling in what I can only call an Anti-eulogy for the dead writer (though Kipling was not dead when this was written - Barnitz asserts that Kipling's writing was symbolically dead at the time of writing. In point of fact, Kipling outlived Barnitz, who died early either from suicide, heart failure, or drug overdose, depending on which sources you believe). Essentially, he destroy's Kipling's reputation by saying there is no reputation there worth destroying. If I were to define the word "scathing" by way of using a literary critique as an illustration, this would be the one.
Barnitz's essay "The Art of the Future"(1901) is an intriguing overview of the state of affairs in American art, music, and literature at that time. There's acknowledgement that not much is happening, but an overly-hopeful patriotic streak runs wide throughout. Barnitz is an excellent essayist, and I would have liked to have read more, even if I didn't fully agree with him or his stylistic choices.
There is a biography included, as well, which shows Barnitz to be a contrarian, plain and simple, one of those people who channels his high intelligence into focused spite. Normally, I might laud Barnitz's snarkiness toward his father, but while reading this biography, I am feeling more and more that he was just a petulant jerk of a son. It's too bad he died young, or he might have gotten over himself and proven a great contributor to dark poetry, maybe even philosophy. Middle age tends to do that to a person.
With so much happening with decadence in and around Harvard during the time Barnitz attended there, it's a wonder that we have very little direct evidence that he interacted with his poetic peers. One wonders if he was a misanthrope or even sociopathic? In any case, he died ignominiously and his work was forgotten until discovered by those who "discovered" H.P. Lovecraft, who mentions Barnitz in a couple of his letters.
Many of the contemporary reviews of The Book of Jade are damning. Most of the critiques of his work are unforgiving, merciless. If you asked the critics, it's a wonder that Barnitz was ever published at all, though I think this is an unfair assessment. Still, I've gotten in trouble on GR for writing reviews like these!
Following the reviews is a section replete with various biographical sketches and references to Barnitz. I realize that this section is meant to satisfy the completist, but I grew tired of it quickly. It's like a really, really boring phone game in which people ("scholars") perpetuate and morph errors again and again. Make it stop!
Next follows a series of essays, and this is what I consider the brain of the book (the poems themselves being the heart, of course, the previous section of biographical sketches the bowels and bladder). K.A. Opperman's essay "The Perfection of the Corpse: Necrophilia in The Book of Jade" is exactly the sort of scholarship I was hoping for in the extra material of this volume. It's a careful thematic analysis focused on one aspect of the poems that draws the subject of necrophilia to the forefront. Now, necrophilia might not be your "thing" (it's not mine, either), but the treatment of the subject is an amazing piece of scholarship, not too academic, but exacting enough that one must take it seriously.
The essay "The Grotesques: Sins Against the Afterlife" by Ashley Dioses really helps my appreciation of Barnitz's ouvre. As I've said, I'm not a good poetry analyst. I'm learning, but I'm far from erudite in this regard: a real amateur! So, it's great to read an essay like Dioses' that I can apply as I go back and reread the poems in my efforts to become better at reading poetry. I'm making progress!
If it was illustrated with cartoons, the first segment of Matt Sarraf's essay on "Barnitz and Pessimism" would read like a reverse Jack Chick tract on anti-natalism. That said, Sarraf does an excellent job of concisely laying out the philosophical war between Hegel and Schopenhauer and arguing (successfully, I think) that Barnitz based his text for the poem "Hegel" on Schopenhauer's arguments against the Hegelian view.
Chuck Caruso, in his essay "I am Weary of that Lidless Eye", gives a fantastic line-by-line analysis of Barnitz's "Mad Sonnet". He also explains Hegel's "abyss of subjectivity" quite well. But his reading of the poem "Hegel" misses the mark and his analysis of Barnitz's poems through the lens of Hegelian philosophy is strained and unconvincing. Interesting that this essay should follow after Sarraf's. Score: Sarraf +1, Caruso 0.
Gavin Callaghan's critique of Barnitz's critique of Rudyard Kipling, "Two Dead men: Park Barnitz and Rudyard Kipling" rightly points out some of the inherent hypocrisy in Barnitz's essay on Kipling. But there is a decidedly pro-conservative bent to the whole essay that becomes as derisive of Barnitz as Barnitz was derisive of Kipling. It's good to have the balance of views, but taken by itself, the essay was off-putting.
Barnitz's poems range from trite to awe-inspiring. If this volume only contained the poems, I might be wont to give it a three, possibly four-star rating. But, given the inclusion of so much scholarly material (so much that one can easily grow tired of it, honestly) of varying viewpoints, this is clearly much more than that. If you are an aficionado of decadence with an eye for scholarly criticism being bandied about, this is your book. If you are, like me, an aspiring comprehender-of-the-poetic, you would do well to pick it up and dive deep into the "loathed sty"!
April 25, 2019
Part 1 suffers from occasional overwrought prose, but Barnitz really ups the ante in Part 2, wherein one can clearly see why Lovecraft was into this. It is a singular work of dark vision, and particularly impressive given Barnitz's age and background. No doubt I would have loved it when I was 16 (or even 21, for that matter).
More information here.
RONDEAU
As shadows pass, in the misty night,
Over the wan and moonlit grass,
So passeth our glory out of sight,
As shadows pass.
A little darkness, a little light,
Sorrow and gladness, a weary mass,
Glimmer and falter and pass in blight.
So all our life, in waning flight,
Fadeth and faltereth, alas;
Passeth our sorrow and our delight,
As shadows pass.
AUTUMN SONG
Weep, far autumnal skies,
Shrouded in misty air;
Weep, for thy solemn dearth,
And for thy chill despair,
Earth.
O stricken forest-trees,
Dead leaves that falter down
Solemnly to your sleep,
Golden, and red, and brown,
Weep.
CONSOLATION
Among all sorrows that my heart hath known,
Among all sorrows that my spirit keep
Forever buried 'neath their mountains steep,
Standeth one consolation, one alone.
I know that earth shall be for death a throne,
And evermore within their burials deep
The banded nations of the earth shall sleep,
Sunken in sepulchres of sculptur'd stone.
Then all the world shall be a quietness:
Dead women beautiful with their delights;
All they that had such striving and distress,
And endless weariness in all the lands,
White faces, eager heart-strings, soiled hands;
And peace shall hold the valleys and the heights.
MAD SONNET
Lo, in the night I cry out, in the night,
God! and my voice shall howl into the sky!
I am weary of seeing shapeless things that fly,
And flap into my face in their vile flight;
I am weary of dead things that crowd into my sight,
I am weary of hearing horrible corpses that cry,
God! I am weary of that lidless Eye
That comes and stares at me, O God of light!
All, all the world is become a dead blur,
God! God! and I, stricken with hideous blight,
Crouch in the black corners, and I dare not stir.
I am aweary of my evil plight.
If thou art not a dead corpse in thy sky,
Send thou down Death into my loathed sty!
MANKIND
They do not know that they are wholly dead,
Nor that their bodies are to the worm given o'er
They pass beneath the sky forevermore;
With their dead flesh the earth is cumbered.
Each day they drink of wine and eat of bread,
And do the things that they have done before;
And yet their hearts are rotten to the core,
And from their eyes the light of life is fled.
Surely the sun is weary of their breath;
They have no ears, and they are dumb and blind;
Long time their bodies hunger for the grave.
How long, O God, shall these dead corpses rave?
When shall the earth be clean of humankind?
When shall the sky cease to behold this death?
THE DEFILERS
O endless idiocy of humankind!
O blatant dead that howl and scream and roar!
O strange dead things the worms have gambled for!
O dull and senseless, foolish, mad and blind!
How long now shall your scent defile the wind?
How long shall you make vile the earth's wide floor?
How long, how long, O waiting ages hoar,
Shall the white dawn their gaping faces find?
O vile and simple, blind of heart and mind,
When shall your last wave roll forevermore
Back from the sick and long-defiled shore?
When shall the grave the last dead carcass bind?
O shameless humankind! O dead! O dead!
When shall your rottenness be buried?
More information here.
RONDEAU
As shadows pass, in the misty night,
Over the wan and moonlit grass,
So passeth our glory out of sight,
As shadows pass.
A little darkness, a little light,
Sorrow and gladness, a weary mass,
Glimmer and falter and pass in blight.
So all our life, in waning flight,
Fadeth and faltereth, alas;
Passeth our sorrow and our delight,
As shadows pass.
AUTUMN SONG
Weep, far autumnal skies,
Shrouded in misty air;
Weep, for thy solemn dearth,
And for thy chill despair,
Earth.
O stricken forest-trees,
Dead leaves that falter down
Solemnly to your sleep,
Golden, and red, and brown,
Weep.
CONSOLATION
Among all sorrows that my heart hath known,
Among all sorrows that my spirit keep
Forever buried 'neath their mountains steep,
Standeth one consolation, one alone.
I know that earth shall be for death a throne,
And evermore within their burials deep
The banded nations of the earth shall sleep,
Sunken in sepulchres of sculptur'd stone.
Then all the world shall be a quietness:
Dead women beautiful with their delights;
All they that had such striving and distress,
And endless weariness in all the lands,
White faces, eager heart-strings, soiled hands;
And peace shall hold the valleys and the heights.
MAD SONNET
Lo, in the night I cry out, in the night,
God! and my voice shall howl into the sky!
I am weary of seeing shapeless things that fly,
And flap into my face in their vile flight;
I am weary of dead things that crowd into my sight,
I am weary of hearing horrible corpses that cry,
God! I am weary of that lidless Eye
That comes and stares at me, O God of light!
All, all the world is become a dead blur,
God! God! and I, stricken with hideous blight,
Crouch in the black corners, and I dare not stir.
I am aweary of my evil plight.
If thou art not a dead corpse in thy sky,
Send thou down Death into my loathed sty!
MANKIND
They do not know that they are wholly dead,
Nor that their bodies are to the worm given o'er
They pass beneath the sky forevermore;
With their dead flesh the earth is cumbered.
Each day they drink of wine and eat of bread,
And do the things that they have done before;
And yet their hearts are rotten to the core,
And from their eyes the light of life is fled.
Surely the sun is weary of their breath;
They have no ears, and they are dumb and blind;
Long time their bodies hunger for the grave.
How long, O God, shall these dead corpses rave?
When shall the earth be clean of humankind?
When shall the sky cease to behold this death?
THE DEFILERS
O endless idiocy of humankind!
O blatant dead that howl and scream and roar!
O strange dead things the worms have gambled for!
O dull and senseless, foolish, mad and blind!
How long now shall your scent defile the wind?
How long shall you make vile the earth's wide floor?
How long, how long, O waiting ages hoar,
Shall the white dawn their gaping faces find?
O vile and simple, blind of heart and mind,
When shall your last wave roll forevermore
Back from the sick and long-defiled shore?
When shall the grave the last dead carcass bind?
O shameless humankind! O dead! O dead!
When shall your rottenness be buried?
August 10, 2021
Reading through The Book of Jade reminds me of a time I tried 2-CB, a psychedelic drug with effects similar to LSD and MDMA. A half-hour after taking this small pill, I'm lying on my bed and have a vision of a Laurence of Arabia-type character riding in the desert on a stallion into the sunset. He is pushing this beast to its absolute limits and behind him is flowing his long white robe. I see a shot of his face and his eyes are wide and teary...he has been struck by a maddening conviction.
This scene slowly fades and then I'm looking at a decaying human face poking out from the mud. The fidelity of this vision increases and I see maggots crawling in and out of its cheeks, its eye sockets, its mouth. It’s absolutely horrific and grotesque, like something you would see in the aftermath of The Battle of the Somme with dead soldiers rotting in trenches.
In the same way these two visions were broken up in two parts, the first shimmering, majestic and blazing, the second morbid, rotten and decaying, so too is The Book of Jade.
Part One has stanzas such as:
"Your soul is like a purple flower
Mary, who eyes are amethyst,
Whose lips are like red wine when kist,"
and
"O poppy-flowers, golden, sleepy, sweet,
O yellow tawny fading blooms of gold,
Give unto me your holy fruit to eat;"
Contrast this then with Part Two with lines such as:
“It lies uncover’d in the pesty gloom,
Eyesless and earless, on the charnel-floor,
While in its nameless corpse the wormlets hoar
Make in its suppurated brain their room.”
and
“The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes;
I know that I have rotted long ago;
My limbs are made one with the worms I know
Where all my head and body putrifies.
So in the earth my coffin’d ordure lies
Within my loathed shambles strait and low.”
There is no denying that Park Barnitz had an obsession with death, which I’m sure was only intensified from his alleged use of opium. Although a sense of death still pervades in Part One, it is somber, melancholic and delicate. Part Two is when Barnitz really lets loose the macabre. Even a poem titled Danse Macabre didn’t make the cut because it was thought to be too gruesome by his editor. It’s luckily included in this New Critical Edition of The Book of Jade, along with short biographies of Barnitz and his father, literary reviews by Barnitz and several essays by decadent scholars.
This scene slowly fades and then I'm looking at a decaying human face poking out from the mud. The fidelity of this vision increases and I see maggots crawling in and out of its cheeks, its eye sockets, its mouth. It’s absolutely horrific and grotesque, like something you would see in the aftermath of The Battle of the Somme with dead soldiers rotting in trenches.
In the same way these two visions were broken up in two parts, the first shimmering, majestic and blazing, the second morbid, rotten and decaying, so too is The Book of Jade.
Part One has stanzas such as:
"Your soul is like a purple flower
Mary, who eyes are amethyst,
Whose lips are like red wine when kist,"
and
"O poppy-flowers, golden, sleepy, sweet,
O yellow tawny fading blooms of gold,
Give unto me your holy fruit to eat;"
Contrast this then with Part Two with lines such as:
“It lies uncover’d in the pesty gloom,
Eyesless and earless, on the charnel-floor,
While in its nameless corpse the wormlets hoar
Make in its suppurated brain their room.”
and
“The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes;
I know that I have rotted long ago;
My limbs are made one with the worms I know
Where all my head and body putrifies.
So in the earth my coffin’d ordure lies
Within my loathed shambles strait and low.”
There is no denying that Park Barnitz had an obsession with death, which I’m sure was only intensified from his alleged use of opium. Although a sense of death still pervades in Part One, it is somber, melancholic and delicate. Part Two is when Barnitz really lets loose the macabre. Even a poem titled Danse Macabre didn’t make the cut because it was thought to be too gruesome by his editor. It’s luckily included in this New Critical Edition of The Book of Jade, along with short biographies of Barnitz and his father, literary reviews by Barnitz and several essays by decadent scholars.
July 8, 2017
A treasure trove of macabre and decadent lyrics. Though some of the poems are hit-and-miss, several are quite excellent and on the whole the read is very rewarding. the new edition by Schultz and Abolafia is a remarkable and laudable work of scholarship.
October 17, 2016
A charming and underrated volume of Decadent verse. The rhythm, rhyme scheme and figurative language can get pretty wonky in places, but overall it's worthy of praise. The book reads like one long poetic suicide note (because, in effect, it was).
Some great music to listen to while you read this:
The Nocturnes of Chopin.
Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness
Some great music to listen to while you read this:
The Nocturnes of Chopin.
Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness
April 14, 2022
An absolutely gorgeous edition of the decadent poems of the criminally unknown poet David Park Barnitz. Highly recommended for fans of Poe, Baudelaire, and Lovecraft
January 12, 2022
Just a fantastic book overall. I happened to read a review for this book in the weird poetry journal Spectral Realms, published by the same publisher, Hippocampus Press.
I had a feeling I might enjoy it, and indeed, it was a delightful dark read. It is shame that David Park Barnitz died so young but luckly through the hard work done by the lovely people of Hippocampus Press he's no longer forgotten.
Barnitz poetry was good and I wonder what else he might have produced if he had lived a longer and healthier life. There is so much potential in his writing. It really a shame to lose a talent like him.
Beside the poems, all the other articles include in this book where highly interesting. The family biography, uncollected writings of Barnitz, and the criticism. The where all interests but I especially enjoyed the article by David E. Schultz, K. A. Opperman, Ashley Dioses, and Chuck Coruso.
I could give it any less than 5 stars!!
I had a feeling I might enjoy it, and indeed, it was a delightful dark read. It is shame that David Park Barnitz died so young but luckly through the hard work done by the lovely people of Hippocampus Press he's no longer forgotten.
Barnitz poetry was good and I wonder what else he might have produced if he had lived a longer and healthier life. There is so much potential in his writing. It really a shame to lose a talent like him.
Beside the poems, all the other articles include in this book where highly interesting. The family biography, uncollected writings of Barnitz, and the criticism. The where all interests but I especially enjoyed the article by David E. Schultz, K. A. Opperman, Ashley Dioses, and Chuck Coruso.
I could give it any less than 5 stars!!
November 12, 2022
Mostly underwhelming.
July 31, 2025
Decadent and symbolist.
March 20, 2019
An obscure classic of the weird and decadent praised by H.P. Lovecraft, The Book of Jade treads a very thin line between the true sumptuousness of a fin de siècle great like Oscar Wilde (see A House of Pomegranates), and the overblown artifice of an adolescent trying to be "dark" and "mystical." Indeed, the influence of Poe and Baudelaire is painfully transparent at times, while the tropes of lush Orientalism, opium, artistic madness, and the Gothic imagery of death, decay, and graveyards are really nothing I haven't seen before. But Park Barnitz's extensive scholarship and careful attention to rhyme and meter set these poems apart, and he really knew how to paint a picture with words.
THE GRAVE
The loathed worms are crawling over me
All the dead hours; about my buried head
Their soft intolerable mouths are gathered,
And in my dead eyes that have ceas'd to see.
I am full of worms and rotten utterly,
Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
The lifeless earth lies close against mine eyes;
I know that I have rotted long ago;
My limbs are made one with the worms I know
Where all my head and body putrifies.
So in the earth my coffin'd ordure lies
Within my loathed shambles strait and low.
There is no thing now where my face hath been,
And all my flesh lies soft upon the floor;
Unto my heart the worms have found a door,
And all my body is to the worms akin;
They long time since their feasting did begin,
And they shall part not from me evermore.
Here lie I stretch'd out through the rotting years,
And I am surely weary of the grave,
And I have sometimes thought that I might rave,
And my two perish'd eyes almost shed tears.
There is no one that sees and none that hears;
I shall not out from my corrupted cave.
Here now forever with the lustful worms
I lie within my putrid sunken sty,
And through eternity my soul shall die.
O thou toward whom all my dead spirit squirms!
Forevermore I love thee through all terms
Until the dead stars rot in the black sky.
January 14, 2025
When he says “I love you” but David Park Barnitz said:
“And now at last I care not if the morning
Come at all, or the pale stars have setting,
Nay I care not if the whole world perish,
Perish and die, or if the white stars falter,
Nay I care not if the night forever
Hold me by her, and all things have ceasing;
Yea, because her lips are more than roses,
Yea, because her breasts are more than Heaven,
Yea, because her face is more than God is,
Among the lilies, in the lily garden.”
“Dead Dialogue” and “End of a Century” are probably my favorite poems from this collection. Every single one of his works in this book are laced with a sense of unshakable melancholia, you can’t help but feel a sense grief and despair as you work your way through them.
There are lines in “Dead Dialogue” that hold an immense amount of weight and meaning. Each line of this poem was written so intentionally and to have it be written as a conversation between corpses makes it feel heavier in a way. In the poem, some corpses have been there longer than others, and they act as though they have finally accepted their ending, while some are still itching to walk amongst the living just one more time, despite the impossibility of that actually occurring. Reading this with the knowledge that Barnitz killed himself at 23, makes each conversational exchange between the corpses feel more like a metaphor for some inner turmoil that the author may have been feeling while teetering back and forth between survival and suicide.
“I would now that the sweet light of the sun Might once again shine down upon my face;
So weary am I of my rottenness.”
“Rejoice that now at least thou art done with life;
This thing shall nevermore return.”
“I do repent me that I did not learn
What life was, while I liv'd beneath the sun-At least then I might think of what I had done;
But I am rotten, and I have not liv'd.”
“Is it so sweet a thing, this love, this love?”
“And now at last I care not if the morning
Come at all, or the pale stars have setting,
Nay I care not if the whole world perish,
Perish and die, or if the white stars falter,
Nay I care not if the night forever
Hold me by her, and all things have ceasing;
Yea, because her lips are more than roses,
Yea, because her breasts are more than Heaven,
Yea, because her face is more than God is,
Among the lilies, in the lily garden.”
“Dead Dialogue” and “End of a Century” are probably my favorite poems from this collection. Every single one of his works in this book are laced with a sense of unshakable melancholia, you can’t help but feel a sense grief and despair as you work your way through them.
There are lines in “Dead Dialogue” that hold an immense amount of weight and meaning. Each line of this poem was written so intentionally and to have it be written as a conversation between corpses makes it feel heavier in a way. In the poem, some corpses have been there longer than others, and they act as though they have finally accepted their ending, while some are still itching to walk amongst the living just one more time, despite the impossibility of that actually occurring. Reading this with the knowledge that Barnitz killed himself at 23, makes each conversational exchange between the corpses feel more like a metaphor for some inner turmoil that the author may have been feeling while teetering back and forth between survival and suicide.
“I would now that the sweet light of the sun Might once again shine down upon my face;
So weary am I of my rottenness.”
“Rejoice that now at least thou art done with life;
This thing shall nevermore return.”
“I do repent me that I did not learn
What life was, while I liv'd beneath the sun-At least then I might think of what I had done;
But I am rotten, and I have not liv'd.”
“Is it so sweet a thing, this love, this love?”
April 21, 2023
More than a curio, but less than a classic, The Book of Jade both stands as an "example of early Decadent American literature" and has the aureolas of parody about it, none of which the latter is addressed in the copious amounts of criticism attached to the slim volume in this vaunted repress. The unknown collaborator and Barnitz's own upbringing scream the self aware participation of a genre rather than the complete naiveté that critics use to excuse the repetitive and structural juvenilia of some of the poems here. That's not to say Barnitz was *not* a miserable misanthrope with deep-seated, perhaps necrophiliac leanings, but rather to say he couched these passions within a deliberate echo of inspirations, one that he seems himself aware of the constraints of—his own declarations of skill seem rather facetious to me, but perhaps I'm wrong. Regardless, some of the poems, especially one such as Fragments, does show a livid despair at the exhaustion of forms that struck fin de siecle literature, one that feels especially appropriate in today's inexhaustible internet trove of culture imitation.
January 26, 2018
Park Barnitz- not a people person.
I don’t know if this book really warrants four stars, but I got four fetid and rotting stars worth of enjoyment out of it, so what the hell. Park Barnitz was a 6’5”, 115 pound necrophiliac nerd from Des Moines who went to Harvard, anonymously published The Book of Jade and then died at 23. The attentive reader will realize that the “strange perfumes” these poems are redolent of are clove cigarettes. You should definitely listen to Christian Death while reading this book.
I don’t know if this book really warrants four stars, but I got four fetid and rotting stars worth of enjoyment out of it, so what the hell. Park Barnitz was a 6’5”, 115 pound necrophiliac nerd from Des Moines who went to Harvard, anonymously published The Book of Jade and then died at 23. The attentive reader will realize that the “strange perfumes” these poems are redolent of are clove cigarettes. You should definitely listen to Christian Death while reading this book.
August 12, 2020
A decadent poet who has some fun little lyrics re: nihilism and rot. But his theme is singular and repetitive even compared to Baudelaire, Trakl et al, and even his images fall back into the same sty, worms of the grave, etc, over and over again. Cut down young, perhaps might have matured into a more interesting and skilled poet. The poems are at least a light touch, easy to read, sometimes worth a dark chuckle.
October 17, 2023
So So Weary of Life, eh?
A good poet this David Park Barnitz, yet too pessimistic and easily bored of life he is and was. Decadent to some degree he was, but nowhere near where Charles Baudelaire sat paralyzed in his own tomb, drunk too too much absinthe for one’s own good. This poet is and was good, writing-wise. He could’ve written more perhaps with more improvement. But perhaps his life got cut too short, but who knows? Recommended for want of decadent poetry…
A good poet this David Park Barnitz, yet too pessimistic and easily bored of life he is and was. Decadent to some degree he was, but nowhere near where Charles Baudelaire sat paralyzed in his own tomb, drunk too too much absinthe for one’s own good. This poet is and was good, writing-wise. He could’ve written more perhaps with more improvement. But perhaps his life got cut too short, but who knows? Recommended for want of decadent poetry…
March 26, 2024
A book of poetry from the Decadent movement that might have been shocking at the time but seems to blend well with modern thought. None of the poems stood out to me.
September 22, 2025
8/10.
His poem "Harvard" pretty much the whole collection. Sometimes repetitive, with simple rhymes, but with vividly evocative imagery.
His poem "Harvard" pretty much the whole collection. Sometimes repetitive, with simple rhymes, but with vividly evocative imagery.
March 27, 2022
Rereading has elevated Barnitz epitaph to my personal canon. Strong contender for the single best poetry collection, in any movement.
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