Ebony and Crystal

by Clark Ashton Smith

Ebony and Crystal

Genres: Poetry, Romance, Fantasy

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Clark Ashton Smith was a poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. It is for these stories, and his literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937, that he is mainly remembered today. With Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, also a friend and correspondent, Smith remains one of the most famous contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

His writings are posted at his official website.

Reviews

[Wreade1872]

No more of gold and marble, nor of snow,
And sunlight, and vermilion, would I make
My vision and my symbols, nor would take
The auroral flame of some prismatic floe,
Nor iris of the frail and lunar bow,
Flung on the shafted waterfalls that wake
The night’s blue slumber in a shadowy lake.***
To body forth my fantasies, and show
Communicable mystery, I would find,
In adamantine darkness of the earth,
Metals untouched of any sun; and bring
Black azures of the nether sea to birth—
Or fetch the secret, splendid leaves, and blind,
Blue lilies of an Atlantean spring.

Hovering between 1 and 2 stars but really i didn’t get much of anything from this one. Take my rating with a grain of salt as I’m nota big fan of (non-narrative) poetry nor can i really judge it on a technical level.

However to me it did feel quite amateurish in many places. There was not a single moment of interest in the first 90 pages and even after that it was sporadic at best.

I thought the prose poetry would be better and i guess it was.. but that wasn’t saying much. Also i don’t know what makes those sections any kind of poetry, it just seemed like story fragments.

Some of the satanic bits were ok and to a lesser extent some of the goth stuff but not much. A lot of the poems are just love sonnets but not with any feeling of depth to them.

Smith uses a lot of descriptive language but one of the strangest things to me was how little imagery all this description evoked. Whether it was the word use or cadence of the poetry, i rarely visualised much.

This one was just a complete wash.

Made available by the Merril Collection.

[Neda]

Definitely some interesting ideas and imagery, but on the whole the language is overwrought and Mr. Smith proves quite repetitious (I never want to read another one of his poems on love, I've just read the same two 50 times).

[Jeff]

Clark Ashton Smith's (CAS) second collection of poetry is great stuff, showing noticeable advancement in both subject and technique over his debut collection The Star-Treader and Other Poems.

The are too many great poems in Ebony and Crystal to list individually, but noteworthy are "The Hashish Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil" (his longest epic poem) as well as a selection of "Poems in Prose". CAS was a master of the latter form, and this collection is worthwhile for those pieces alone, since they provide a alternative structure in which CAS could allow his poetic talents to blossom.

[Steven]

Cosmic imaginations

Some of the poems were reprinted here from "Odes and Sonnets". However, this collection is far better. The Hashish Eater or Apocalypse of Evil is very long imaginative tour de force of a poesy that spoke of the Emperor of Dreams trying to escape the dark tide of nightmarish apocalypse beset with divers kinds of monsters and other chimeric creature.

[SARDON]

Though owing much to Poe, C.A. Smith far surpasses his predecessor of the fantastic in his natural sense of poetry's music and the often visionary qualities of his imagery. I'd say, as far as poetry is concerned, he also surpassed his contemporary, Lovecraft, though the works of both share a darkly cosmic scope. As the title denotes, these selections also include prose poems whose strange beauty rivals even the works of Baudelaire; which also marks Smith as one of the very few successful American poets of truly decadent sensibility.

There's plenty of C.A. Smith's poetry available for free online, so I'm not going to post any samples here.


But if your tastes run toward the antique and exotic with a strong infusion of the weird, this collection is a very affordable choice among the many expensive options available for C.A. Smith's poetry.

[Noisegen]

Surprisingly good work, I had no idea Clark Ashton Smith was such an adept poet.