A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

The most general influence, perhaps, is Clark Ashton Smith. While it is true that fiction had, by around 1921, already come at least to equal poetry as Lovecraft’s major aesthetic outlet, it can also be no accident that the virtual surcease of his poetic output from 1922 to 1928 commenced at the very time he came in touch with Smith. Here was a poet who was writing dense, vigorous weird and cosmic poetry in a vibrant, vital manner as far removed as possible from the eighteenth century or even from the poetry of Poe. Lovecraft had long realized, in an abstract way, the deficiencies of his own poetry, but had rarely encountered a living poet doing work he could admire and even envy; now he came upon just such a poet. Lovecraft’s verse during this period accordingly descends to harmless birthday odes or other occasional verse, with rare exceptions such as the powerful ‘The Cats’, ‘Primavera’, or ‘Festival’ (published as ‘Yule Horror’).

Then, around 1928, he began work on Moe’s Doorways to Poetry. After a long period of quiescence, Lovecraft was forced to turn his attention again to the theory of poetry. The immediate influence on the Fungi, however, clearly seems to be Wandrei’s

Sonnets of the Midnight Hours, which Lovecraft read no later than November 1927. This cycle—in which all the poems are in the first person and all are inspired by actual dreams by Wandrei—is certainly very powerful, but does not seem to me quite as polished or as cumulatively affecting as Lovecraft’s. Nevertheless, Lovecraft clearly derived the basic idea of a sonnet cycle from this work.

Winfield Townley Scott and Edmund Wilson independently believed that the Fungi may have been influenced by Edwin Arlington Robinson, but I cannot find any evidence that Lovecraft had read Robinson by this time, or in fact ever read him. He is not mentioned in any correspondence I have seen prior to 1935. The parallels in diction adduced by Scott seem to be of a very general sort and do not establish a sound case for any such influence.

We now come to the vexed question of what the Fungi from Yuggoth actually is. Is it a strictly unified poem that reveals some sort of ‘continuity’, or is it merely a random collection of sonnets flitting from topic to topic with little order or sequence? I remain inclined toward the latter view. No one can possibly believe that there is any actual plot

to this work, in spite of various critics’ laboured attempts to find such a thing; and other critics’ claims for a kind of ‘unity’ based on structure or theme or imagery are similarly unconvincing because the ‘unity’ so discovered does not seem at all systematic or coherent. My conclusion remains that the Fungi sonnets provided Lovecraft with an opportunity to crystallize various conceptions, types of imagery, and fragments of dreams that could not have found creative expression in fiction—a sort of imaginative housecleaning. The fact that he so exhaustively used ideas from his commonplace book for the sonnets supports this conclusion.

Some of the sonnets seem to be reworkings of some of the dominant conceptions of previous stories. ‘Nyarlathotep’ is a close retelling of the prose poem of 1920; ‘The Elder Pharos’ speaks of a figure who ‘wears a silken mask’, whom we first saw in The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath; ‘Alienation’ seems roughly based upon ‘The Strange High House in the Mist’. More significantly, some poems seem to be anticipations of stories Lovecraft would write in later years, making the Fungi a sort of recapitulation of what he had written before and a presage of his subsequent work.

Those who argue for the ‘unity’ of the Fungi must take account of the somewhat odd manner in which the cycle achieved its present state. ‘Recapture’ (now sonnet XXXIV) was written in late November, presumably as a separate poem. For years after it was written, the Fungi comprised only thirty-five sonnets. In 1936, when R. H. Barlow considered publishing it as a booklet, he suggested that ‘Recapture’ be added to the cycle; but, when he rather casually tacked it on at the end of a typescript he was preparing, Lovecraft felt that it should be placed third from the end: ‘“Recapture” seems somehow more specific & localised

in spirit than either of the others named, hence would go better before them—allowing the Fungi to come to a close with more diffusive ideas.’¹⁵ To my mind, this suggests no more than that Lovecraft had some rough idea that the cycle ought to be read in sequence and ought to end with a more general utterance. And yet, shortly after finishing the series he was still mentioning casually the possibility of ‘grind[ing] out a dozen or so more before I consider the sequence concluded’.¹⁶