And yet, Lovecraft was by no means in the modernist camp. Several intensely interesting documents of this period bear this out with much emphasis. It is certainly odd that the two great landmarks of modernism—Joyce’s
We here behold a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general; offered to the public (whether or not as a hoax) as something justified by our modern mind with its recent comprehension of its own chaotic triviality and disorganisation. And we behold th[e] public, or a considerable part of it, receiving this hilarious melange as something vital and typical; as ‘a poem of profound significance,’ to quote its sponsors.
This is one of the most notorious pieces of evidence of Lovecraft’s supposed insensitivy to modernism and of his innate aesthetic conservatism; but it is difficult to see what other reaction he could have made at this stage of his development. It should also be pointed out that many other reviewers—not merely stodgy Victorians like J. C. Squire but level-headed modernists like Conrad Aiken—also found the poem incomprehensible or at least ambiguous and incoherent, although some did not think it a bad poem on that account. As for Lovecraft, he may by this time have given up his literal adherence to eighteenth-century forms—or, at least, his requirement that all other poets do so—but the outward form of
I think too much has been made of the supposed similarities in philosophy and temperament of Eliot and Lovecraft: to be sure, they may both have been classicists (of a sort) and believed in continuity of culture; but Lovecraft rightly scorned Eliot’s later royalism as a mere ostrich-act and heaped even more abuse on Eliot’s belief in religion as a necessary foundation or bulwark of civilization.
But Lovecraft’s other response to
What Lovecraft very simply seeks to do in this work is to carry to a
Henry Fielding wrote
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
Good night, good night, the stars are bright I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight
Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.
Nobody home
In the shantih.
That delightful final pun ‘confirms the jerrybuilt quality of modern life and art’, as Barton L. St Armand and John H. Stanley remark; and as for the poem as a whole, its ‘scraps of twentieth-century conversations, news bulletins, public announcements, newspaper headlines, and advertising jingles reflect the mundane tawdriness of the present as contrasted to the epic grandeur of the past’.21