I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft

by S.T. Joshi

initially refused to do so; then, while the ceremony

I also do not know what overwhelming virtues there are in being “normal,” whatever criteria one cares to apply to that word.

not merely to add to his store of knowledge to the end of his life but to revise his world view in light of that knowledge.

Amateur Journalism has provided me with the very world in which I live. Of a nervous and reserved temperament, and cursed with an aspiration which far exceeds my endowments, I am a typical misfit in the larger world of endeavour, and singularly unable to derive enjoyment from ordinary miscellaneous activities.

perhaps I might best have been compared to the lowly potato in its secluded and subterranean quiescence.

For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the unlistening void.

focon

panegyric,

adumbrate

arrogate

thy

We cannot assume that the Universe has only five qualities because we have only five senses. We must assume, on the contrary, that the number of its qualities may be infinite, and that the more senses we had, the more we should discover about it.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence—the idea that, given the infinity of space, time, and matter, all entities and events in the universe are bound to recur an infinite number of times.

“A vast, sepulchral universe of unbroken midnight gloom and perpetual arctic frigidity, through which will roll dark, cold suns with their hordes of dead, frozen planets, on which will lie the dust of those unhappy mortals who will have perished as their dominant stars faded from their skies.

recrudescence

would tease Long about his “moustachelet”

bathetic.

coevally

To my mind, this and other of Smith’s early poems are quite superior to the “cosmic” poetry of George Sterling (1869–1926), although Smith has clearly learnt from Sterling’s two long poems, The Testimony of the Suns (1903) and A Wine of Wizardry (1907).

recondite

Joris-Karl Huysmans, particularly A Rebours)

William Beckford’s Vathek (1786),

The Episodes of Vathek (long stories narrated by various characters in Vathek but not published until 1912);

1923 Martin Secker issued a nine-volume collected edition of his work;

Ornaments in Jade; the first edition of The Hill of Dreams

Walter Pater,

S. Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1869),

Fiona Macleod’s “The Sin-Eater,” which Lovecraft read in Joseph Lewis French’s anthology, Best Psychic Stories (1920).

Irvin S. Cobb, “The Unbroken Chain,” published in Cosmopolitan for September 1923

Cobb’s collection On an Island That Cost $24.00 (1926).

adumbration

Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702),

poke-bonnet

Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.”[45]

blindman’s buff

Dresden-china Arcadia

(Dickens is despised for maudlin sentimentality, and Thackeray “induceth drowsiness”[63])

refulgent

mossbacks

contretemps

fin de siècle

Ben Hecht’s Erik Dorn

The fact that contemporary poetry has dropped utterly out of the intellectual lives of even well-educated people may suggest that Lovecraft’s warnings against too radical a departure from tradition may not have been entirely unsound.

ochlocracy

have been in keeping with this

hist’ry

perfervid

Blackwood

Episodes

Before Thirty (19...