In 1929 Lovecraft made the following evaluation of the progression of his aesthetic thought: “I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.”[60] Simply put, these two phases (which would then be followed by a third and final phase combining the best features of both the previous two, and
...more
