The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

New York: Hippocampus Press, 2012; $75.00 hc in 3 volumes; 1284 pages

Volume One: The Abyss Triumphant

Volume Two: The Wine of Summer

Volume Three: The Flowers of Evil and Others

The way to review something as massive as The Complete Poetry and Translations by Clark Ashton Smith is to just stop and force yourself to do it. There are hundreds of poems here, many of them previously unpublished, not even counting the translations from French and Spanish poetry, and it would take years to truly master all of them. You could find yourself dipping in and discovering something new indefinitely and never get around to writing the review.

First, let me say that this paperback edition is an event of considerable importance. Inasmuch as Clark Ashton Smith, the noted Weird Tales author and colleague of H.P. Lovecraft, can be accounted a major American poet, it is impossible to exaggerate how important this edition is. It makes Smith’s poetic oeuvre available for the first time ever. Before this in 2002, Hippocampus (and the same editors) brought out a much smaller collection of the best fantastic poems of Smith, called The Last Oblivion (hopefully not a prophetic title), which on a smaller scale made Smith’s poetry available to the general reader for the first time.

For once we can’t blame the benighted academics or mainstream prejudice or anything but scarcity of the texts for Smith’s lack of general recognition. After a small flurry of publications and a certain amount of critical acclaim in the first years of the twentieth century, he was reduced to self-publication by the 1920s, and he fell into complete obscurity thereafter. Later, his poetry was published in a couple of slim volumes by Arkham House (The Dark Chateau, Spells and Philtres) and a much thicker Selected Poems from Arkham (1971), but these reached only a very specialized audience. The books went out of print quickly, and copies soon cost fantastic sums on the used book market. A handful of pamphlets and microeditions published by Roy Squires reached an even smaller audience of collectors.

That was it. Everything was out of print, very rare, and very expensive. The noted poet and fantasist Fred Chappell once told me in an interview that, no, he had not been much influenced by the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith because, alas, he had missed Selected Poems when it came out and had been unable to afford it or any of the others thereafter. (To give you an idea of contemporary prices, a quick search on Abebooks.com reveals The Star-Treader and Other Poems, 1912, Smith’s first book, for a mere $1750.00. The Hill of Dionysus, 1961, is available for $1500. Spells and Philtres, 1958, $1200.00. You get the idea. While collectability may have nothing to do with literary merit, prices like that lead to a sheer unavailability of reading copies, which can be a significant factor limiting a writer’s impact.)

So we must be deeply grateful to Joshi and Schultz for the job they have done. They have assembled everything, with extensive scholarly notes. The third volume, consisting of translations, gives the original French and Spanish texts (including the entirety of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil) on facing pages to the Smith versions. In addition to Baudelaire, Smith translated a great variety of French decadents, symbolists, and aesthetes, including Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, and many others. This is all the more astonishing when you consider that he taught himself French and Spanish entirely from books without ever speaking those languages with anyone.

We couldn’t ask for a better edition. I will admit the one thing I could ask for is a glossary of the rare and unusual words, about which more anon. The Last Oblivion had such a glossary. It is still useful. For the first time, I say again, the poetical corpus of Klarkash-Ton (as Lovecraft playfully dubbed him) is made available. University libraries need this set. Seventy-five dollars may still seem a bit steep, but there literally is no alternative. I do think, though, that Hippocampus would do Smith a service by reprinting The Last Oblivion (which sold for $15.00) and keeping it in print permanently as an introductory volume for people not ready to take the plunge into buying the big set.

This then, is only the beginning for Smith as a poet. I mentioned not blaming benighted academics. Do not be surprised if, to this day, the name Clark Ashton Smith draws only blank stares in college literature departments. He is far outside the canon. For most scholars, his work, along with that of some of his predecessors and all of his successors, is unexplored territory. A point I used to argue in graduate school was that outside the official canon there are other canons, whole separate traditions which may have fallen into obscurity through the odd zigs and zags of critical fashion. In this case, it’s nobody’s fault. Smith’s work was never widely enough available for academia or the critical establishment to discover it.

How about for readers? If you’re a Baby Boomer, very likely you discovered Smith through Lovecraft (who is the gateway drug for so many others) and read his Weird Tales fiction first. His poetry, you only heard about. Maybe you found a couple examples in old issues of Weird Tales or his celebrated poem “The Hashish-Eater” reprinted in a Lin Carter anthology. Maybe you were quick and bought a Selected Poems when the getting was good, at which point you were left struggling with it for the next 40 years. Smith is that sort of writer, problematic and fascinating at the same time. He won’t let go, any more than Lovecraft will.

Clark Ashton Smith is certainly a poet of very considerable merit, a real, serious poet, someone who regarded poetry as his main career and mode of expression, light-years beyond the sort of folks who just wrote verse fillers for pulp magazines, and even well ahead of many of his genuinely gifted Weird Tales colleagues, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Donald Wandrei, and a few others.

At the same time, Smith is a difficult poet. There is nothing wrong with that. Difficulty does not preclude greatness. Examples from Edmund Spenser to Ezra Pound readily come to mind. But even his difficulty presents difficulties. There will be, first of all, a considerable amount of culture shock when he makes contact with mainstream academia. I recall the time 30 years or so in the past when I showed his work to a poet/playwright I knew, saying, “Some people think this is a major poet.” My friend read a few lines then stopped and said, “That’s a shame.” For someone trained on modern poetry, it was just too strange.

Smith’s roots are in Milton, Poe, Baudelaire, maybe Swinburne, in the French Symbolist school (about which most Anglophone readers know very little). His work is usually rhymed or else in blank (not free) verse. He is completely out of step with the direction English language poetry took in the twentieth century from Pound and Eliot on through William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsburg, and onward. He used not plain language but elevated language, deliberately Latinate, and defended this choice for both prose and verse, as when he wrote to a correspondent in 1950:

As to my own employment of an ornate style, using many words of classic origin and exotic color, I can only say that it is designed to produce effects of language and rhythm which could not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to what is known as “basic English.” ... An atmosphere of remoteness, vastness, mystery, and exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler shades, tints, and nuances of meaning—all of which, of course, are wasted or worse than wasted on the average reader, even if presumably literate. (Selected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith 365)

But, as they say, moderation in all things. Legend has it Smith educated himself by reading the unabridged dictionary cover to cover. Certainly he had little formal schooling, but he was enormously self-educated, often along eccentric lines. His vocabulary was odd. He wasn’t showing off when he wrote “arboraceous fuel” instead of “firewood” (a choice which made a young Isaac Asimov give up on his tales). That was just the way the language worked for Smith, and it certainly came more from book learning than from conversation. In his poems, this can be an irritant as in “Antony and Cleopatra,” an exquisite, erotic poem in which we find the two famous lovers in bed, experiencing that post-coital “drowsy joy that is not ecstasy,” and then we read:

Dawn shall rise,

A hueless nenuphar in heavenly pools.…

(The Abyss Triumphant 57)

A hueless what? Maybe you imagine a nenuphar as an eldritch, lurking frog-like creature the color of pale dead flesh, but if you use the handy glossary in The Last Oblivion you learn that a nenuphar is merely a water-lily. Couldn’t Smith have written “water-lily,” without undue damage to his meter?

And then, “The Hashish-Eater” is full of things like “volcanoes lava-langued” and “And quench his dome with greenish tetter” and “sapphires fine as orris-seed” and “cliff-like brows of plunging scolopendras,” and so on and so on. Now, we have to grant an author his vocabulary, and not expect him to dumb things down to “basic English.” We can even accept the need to learn a bit of the author’s personal jargon, particularly from a poet (think of Yeats with his “perne in gyre”), but arguably too much is too much, and for most readers of Smith (“even if literate,” as he would doubtless sneer) the effect is merely to produce lacunae—gaps in the text—which the reader just skips over on first reading. Yes, these are real words, not made-up gibberish, but the best one can hope to do is to look them up later, then come back to the poem as if preparing a translation, and eventually work out what the poet means. The only solution I can see, which the editors did not pursue, would be to have, as in a college textbook of Shakespeare or Chaucer, notes in the margins of every page, line by line, so this sort of thing can be taken in at a glance, rather than turned into a research project. Otherwise all possible spontaneity is lost, and the best of Smith’s poems do have considerable spontaneity to them. They need to be read in a kind of emotional rush, as does this one, one of my own favorites, “Resurrection,” which begins:

Sorceress and sorcerer,

Risen from the sepulcher,

From the deep, unhallowed ground,

We have found and we have bound

Each the other, as before,

With the fatal spells of yore,

With Sabbatic sign, and word

That Thessalian moons have heard.

Sorcerer and sorceress,

Hold we still our heathenness—

Loving without sin or shame—

As in years of stake and flame.

Share we now the witches’ madness,

Wake the Hecatean gladness,

Call the demon named Delight

From his lair of burning night.

(The Wine of Summer 447–448)

Notice that this poem contains no hyperexotic words and is all the stronger for it. It demands little more rudimentary classical knowledge. If you don’t know who Hecate is or what a sabbat is, you as a reader of fantastic literature, should find out right away. Thessaly is a region of Greece, famously witch-haunted.

I am not alone in preferring Smith’s medium-length or shorter poems to his very long ones. Fred Chappell articulates this point of view in some detail in an essay in Scott Connors’s admirable Smith symposium, The Freedom of Fantastic Things and goes so far as to suggest that the fame (such as it has, mostly from the enthusiastic praise by Lovecraft) of “The Hashish-Eater” may ultimately hamper a truer appreciation of Smith’s actual merits. “The Hashish-Eater, or, The Apocalypse of Evil,” is one of Smith’s cosmic poems, almost 600 lines, filled with stars, monsters, and alien landscapes, and every possible excess of description. It begins magnificently, with lines every Smith devotee has doubtless memorized:

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

I crown me with the million-colored sun

Of secret worlds incredible, and take

Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

Throned on the mounting zenith and illume

The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

(The Abyss Triumphant 207)

But I, blasphemously, wonder how many readers have actually finished “The Hashish-Eater.” Description piled upon description palls after a while. This is not to say that Smith’s long poems like this or the stately “The Star-Treader” are bad works of art. But they take some getting used to. They are not the place to begin. It may take years before you work your way up to them. Start instead with “Satan Unrepentant” or “Nero,” which, as Chappell argues, are considerably more restrained, better organized than such a massive gush as “The Hashish-Eater.” Chappell particularly recommends “In Saturn” (which is fourteen lines).

Smith is, as I have said, far more than a magazine-filler poet. His best work is romantic, elegant, and darkly beautiful. It has a considerable erotic element, something notably lacking, say, in the verse of his pal Lovecraft. His work is also, unsurprising for a poet so inspired by Poe and Baudelaire, intensely macabre, filled with images of death and desolation and ruminations on the folly of human striving. He is a poet who stares into the abyss. This is not likely to gain him widespread recognition in mundane circles. Donald Sidney-Fryer (in the interview I did with him in NYRSF #264) once described Smith as “the specter at the feast.” His work is certainly not written to cheer you up.

Smith showed considerable range, writing long, cosmic poems, sonnets, and haiku, even producing an entire play in blank verse, set in Zothique, the Earth’s last continent of the far future, with the intriguing title of “The Dead Will Cuckold You.” (As drama, probably not all that workable. It is hard to imagine actors delivering Smith’s lines the way they might deliver Shakespeare’s or even Christopher Fry’s as something that sounds like actual speech, for all it is in verse. This is surely meant to be read, not performed.) His work was above all else immensely imaginative, intended, as was all his work, to transport the reader beyond everyday concerns, “beyond the human aquarium,” as he once put it. He is the kind of poet whose works you should keep on your shelves to dip into every once in a while. Each time you do, you will discover gems.

Darrell Schweitzer was the de facto poetry editor of Weird Tales for 19 years.

Works Cited

• Fred Chappell. “Communicable Mysteries, The Last True Symbolist.” In The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith, edited by Scott Connors. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006.
• Smith, Clark Ashton. Selected Letters, edited by David E. Schultz and Scott Connors. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 2003.