The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith
Authors: Clark Ashton Smith
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sorcerer Nathaire in “The Colossus of Ylourgne.” Alas, the might-have-been.…
Whatever may have been the reasons for the cessation of his writing fiction—the continued production of his quintessential sculptures or the loss of his parents and of his literary frère et semblable H.P.L.—Smith only wrote little more than a dozen stories between the late 1930s and his death in 1961. Increasingly, it has now turned out that the real or chief reason for his apparent abandonment of writing fiction was his ever-growing disgust with the arbitrary capriciousness of magazine editors, a not inconsiderable factor for a sensitive artist in words as Ashton Smith. Also, he had returned to his first love, the creation of poetry in verse: by late 1941 Smith had three collections or cycles of verse in preparation: Incantations , The Jasmine Girdle , and Wizard’s Love and Other Poems (later retitled The Hill of Dionysus ). Thus, it was during the penultimate decade of his life that Smith composed and/or assembled his final poem-cycles. Incantations contains mainly poems composed during the 1920s and 1930s, hitherto largely uncollected, as well as many unpublished poems. The Hill of Dionysus and especially The Jasmine Girdle both contain many poems never-before published; both are cycles of love poems. And if all the preceding mass of poetry, much of it new, were not already quite enough for a man in his fifties—a man who had moreover in the early part of his career created three major collections of poetry—Smith also experimented with such miniature forms as the quintrain and the haiku, the last surely the quintessence of quintessential forms. All-told, he now created over one hundred miniature poems, a small sampling of which is presented in Spells and Philtres (Arkham House, 1958). These divers collections are included in the Selected Poems that Smith was concurrently engaged in assembling during the 1940s. In addition, Smith learned Spanish during this decade, made translations from Spanish poets, and even wrote a small number of poems in Spanish. Such productivity, much of it in new forms and in new directions and some of it even in a new language for Smith, must be considered remarkable indeed for a man in age already past the half-century mark. Phoenix-like, the poet had been reborn out of the ashes of the fiction-writer.
The founding of Arkham House in 1939 by August Derleth assured the publication of six collections of Smith’s short stories in book form: Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960), Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), and Other Dimensions (1970). Upon publication of Out of Space and Time , the well-known writer and man-of-letters Benjamin De Casseres in his syndicated column “The March of Events” dated Sep. 23, 1942 (this column appeared on the editorial page of the Hearst newspapers), commented briefly on Smith’s first major prose collection and hailed Smith not only as a great poet and a great story-teller but as “a great prose writer” as well.
Only to the encouragement of his publisher do we owe the existence of the omnibus volume of Smith’s first Arkham House poetry, the Selected Poems . This volume was originally entitled The Hashish-Eater and Other Poems and was intended by Smith’s publisher to be a complete collection of all of Smith’s poetry. Subsequently Smith decided instead to make it a selective volume. Produced during the period 1944–1949, it contains about 500 poems, virtually two-thirds of the 800 poems or so extant at the time of Smith’s death. Delivered to his publisher in December 1949, this collection of collections contains the following sections: The Star-Treader and Other Poems , Ebony and Crystal (minus the twenty-nine poems in prose), Sandalwood , Translations and Paraphrases (from Baudelaire, Verlaine, Victor Hugo and other poets both French and Spanish), Incantations , Quintrains ,
Whatever may have been the reasons for the cessation of his writing fiction—the continued production of his quintessential sculptures or the loss of his parents and of his literary frère et semblable H.P.L.—Smith only wrote little more than a dozen stories between the late 1930s and his death in 1961. Increasingly, it has now turned out that the real or chief reason for his apparent abandonment of writing fiction was his ever-growing disgust with the arbitrary capriciousness of magazine editors, a not inconsiderable factor for a sensitive artist in words as Ashton Smith. Also, he had returned to his first love, the creation of poetry in verse: by late 1941 Smith had three collections or cycles of verse in preparation: Incantations , The Jasmine Girdle , and Wizard’s Love and Other Poems (later retitled The Hill of Dionysus ). Thus, it was during the penultimate decade of his life that Smith composed and/or assembled his final poem-cycles. Incantations contains mainly poems composed during the 1920s and 1930s, hitherto largely uncollected, as well as many unpublished poems. The Hill of Dionysus and especially The Jasmine Girdle both contain many poems never-before published; both are cycles of love poems. And if all the preceding mass of poetry, much of it new, were not already quite enough for a man in his fifties—a man who had moreover in the early part of his career created three major collections of poetry—Smith also experimented with such miniature forms as the quintrain and the haiku, the last surely the quintessence of quintessential forms. All-told, he now created over one hundred miniature poems, a small sampling of which is presented in Spells and Philtres (Arkham House, 1958). These divers collections are included in the Selected Poems that Smith was concurrently engaged in assembling during the 1940s. In addition, Smith learned Spanish during this decade, made translations from Spanish poets, and even wrote a small number of poems in Spanish. Such productivity, much of it in new forms and in new directions and some of it even in a new language for Smith, must be considered remarkable indeed for a man in age already past the half-century mark. Phoenix-like, the poet had been reborn out of the ashes of the fiction-writer.
The founding of Arkham House in 1939 by August Derleth assured the publication of six collections of Smith’s short stories in book form: Out of Space and Time (1942), Lost Worlds (1944), Genius Loci and Other Tales (1948), The Abominations of Yondo (1960), Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964), and Other Dimensions (1970). Upon publication of Out of Space and Time , the well-known writer and man-of-letters Benjamin De Casseres in his syndicated column “The March of Events” dated Sep. 23, 1942 (this column appeared on the editorial page of the Hearst newspapers), commented briefly on Smith’s first major prose collection and hailed Smith not only as a great poet and a great story-teller but as “a great prose writer” as well.
Only to the encouragement of his publisher do we owe the existence of the omnibus volume of Smith’s first Arkham House poetry, the Selected Poems . This volume was originally entitled The Hashish-Eater and Other Poems and was intended by Smith’s publisher to be a complete collection of all of Smith’s poetry. Subsequently Smith decided instead to make it a selective volume. Produced during the period 1944–1949, it contains about 500 poems, virtually two-thirds of the 800 poems or so extant at the time of Smith’s death. Delivered to his publisher in December 1949, this collection of collections contains the following sections: The Star-Treader and Other Poems , Ebony and Crystal (minus the twenty-nine poems in prose), Sandalwood , Translations and Paraphrases (from Baudelaire, Verlaine, Victor Hugo and other poets both French and Spanish), Incantations , Quintrains ,
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