At the outset it was one particular phase of Dunsany’s philosophy—cosmicism—that most attracted Lovecraft. He would maintain hyperbolically in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that Dunsany’s “point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period,” although later he would modify this opinion considerably. What is somewhat strange, therefore, is that Lovecraft’s own imitations are—with the sole exception of “The Other Gods”—not at all cosmic in scope, and rarely involve that interplay of “gods and men” which is so striking a characteristic of Dunsany’s early work.
