From the New England tradition and atmosphere in the Poems of Frederic and Mary Palmer to the broad and awesome spaces of California in Clark Ashton
Smith’s The Star-Treader and Other Poems is a contrast more impressive in mental and spiritual qualities than for physical opposites in the formation and scale of nature.
52 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Mr. Smith is a very young man, this collection of poems being to the credit of his nineteenth years. They show his youth, his as yet unrealized value of simple words and phrases. The imagination of childhood is still with him; he has glimpses of those presences which Wordsworth said lay about our infancy like an atmosphere.
He shows in places a tolerable command of music, and now and then breaks out
with a flaming characterization of mood, a haunting and a piercing epithet that cuts into mystery like a flashing gleam of a bird’s wing darting in the sunlight. These successes are notable because they are rare in the midst of a heavy, rumbling, confused, piled-up succession of images. There is a lot of rough ore in this book, which time and practice on Mr. Smith’s part might refine into very noble and beautiful poetry. The spell of those vast, towering mountain heights which tinge with sublimity the poets of California is upon this youth, and he appears helpless under their daring evocations. We are constantly confronted with such phrases as “inter-vital sleep,”6 “systems triplicate,”7 “anterior ones,”8 “shuttles intricate of earth,”9
“rapt in aural splendors ultimate,”10 and “candent ores.”11 We find imitations of Keat’s worst mannerisms in compound verbs, as in this example:
It yours adown the sky
And rears at the cliff of night
Uppiled against the vast [ sic]12
But the substance of a very fine poet is in Mr. Smith. He has displayed in this book imagination enough to stock a good many poets, but where poets of infinitely less imagination are his masters as artists and seers, is in the focusing of the imaginative quality with the intensity that generates vision. The instinct of vision is lacking in this young poet; his imagination is without vision. What he yet may do is attested in this isolated gleam that burns in the dull metal of his chaotic ideas; this lines in which the one word “pinnacled” transforms the significance of an otherwise commonplace expression: “Great ideals pinnacled in thought.”13
Harriet Monroe. “Recent Poetry.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 2, No. 1 (April 1913): 31–32.14
This Californian has extreme youth in his favor, so it would be idle to complain that his subjects are chiefly astronomic. Life will bring him down to earth, no doubt, in her usual brusque manner, and will teach him something more intimate
to write about than winds and stars and forsaken gods. Meantime he shows an un-
usual imaginative power of visualizing these remote splendors until they have the concrete definiteness of a personal experience. These lines To the Sun for example: Thy light is an eminence unto thee,
And thou art upheld by the pillars of thy strength.
Thy power is a foundation for the worlds;
They are builded thereon as upon a lofty rock
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
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Whereto no enemy hath access.
Thou puttest forth thy rays, and they uphold the sky
As in the hollow of an immense hand.
Thou erectest thy light as four walls
And a roof with many beams and pillars.
Thy flame is a stronghold based as a mountain;
Its bastions are tall, and firm like stone.
In spite of the sophomoric quality in many of these poems we have here a rare
spirit and the promise of poetic art.
II. Ebony and Crystal
[Frank] Morton Todd. “Clark Ashton Smith’s New Volume . Ebony and Crystal Marks Another Stage in the Development of a California Genius.”
Argonaut (16 December 1922): 387–88.15
On a piece of ranch land above Auburn there dwells at peace with life one of the authentic poets of today; a self-educated man, who, under the blue school law of Oregon, would probably have been packed in a mental cannery and turned out a
standardized mind with a state label. But because, like Herbert Spencer, he could not attend school, he was driven by the force of an unusual intellect to what is called in olden phrase omnivorous reading. And being ridden with the soul of a
poet he has woven into exquisite verse the winnowings of years and of libraries, with more of his own creations, until he ranges into one sweep some of the power of Kipling, the imagery of Poe and Milton and Coleridge, the delicacy of Shelley, the verbal beauty of Keats. I do not think of claiming for him that he is any of these. On the contrary, he falls short of any of them. He may never develop the stark force of Kipling, he may never penetrate so deeply into things as to learn to lift the soul with beauty like Coleridge, or haunt it eternally with the enchantments of Poe. And yet, no one knows. Give him time, and he may stir us with something more musical than “Ulalume,” more poignant in its love-and-death tragedy than
“Annabel Lee,” or the stanzas “To Annie.” At present he seems to be delving
from the surface of things into certain dark pits of sorcery too remote from our common emotional experience to get a real hold on us except through our perception of beauty and our admiration of his gorgeous, flaming visions. But that is much; in fact, tremendous. And so when George Sterling, who is his mentor and
who mothers his growing genius, came into the office with a new volume of Clark Ashton Smith’s verses, the book was hailed as an event in the literary history of California, and one worthily upholding the traditions of the state.
Smith’s latest book is entitled Ebony and Crystal. In verse after verse, one stanza after another, it exerts that peculiar charm he finds in the beauty of things. If he made a catalogue of his nouns it would alone be enticing. He seems to have culled
54 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
from all the objects in the world those that are beautiful, to weave the names of them into lines as delicate as bedewed gossamer. It is the “beauty of the visible”—
yet not altogether satisfying, so he sets us this:
A PRECEPT
With words of ivory,
Of bronze, of ebony,
Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold,
The beauty of the visible is told.
But how with these express
The unseen Loveliness—
Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound.
The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found?
No shining words of stone—
Shadow and cloud alone—
These shall the poet seek eternally,
Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.
It seems to be required of a poet that he shall have a “philosophy,” and per-
haps Smith’s is expounded in this crystal splinter:
TRANSCENDENCE
To look on love with disappointed eyes;
To see with gaze relentless, rendered clear
Of hope or hatred, of desire and fear,
The insuperable nullity that lies
Behind the veils of various disguise
Which life or death may haply weave; to hear
Forevermore in flute and harp the mere
And all-resolving silence; recognize
The gules of autumn in the greening leaf,
And in the poppy-pod the poppy-flow’r—
This is to be the lord of love and grief,
O’er Time’s illusion and thyself supreme,
As, half-aroused in some nocturnal hour,
The dreamer knows and dominates his dream.
It is not, however, in any philosophy that we find the best of this poet, but in the veritable poetic spell, conveyed in the vehicle of the great Keats himself: that of the beauty of thoughts, strengthened by that compelling philtre, the beauty of
thi
ngs. This example is probably as good as any, although the whole volume is
pervaded with these qualities:
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
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FLAMINGOES
On skies of tropic evening broad and beryl-green,
Above a tranquil sea of molten malachite,
With flare of scarlet wings, in long and level flight,
The soundless, fleet flamingoes pass to isles unseen.
They pass and disappear, where darkening palms indent
The horizon, underneath some high and tawny star—
Lost in the sunset gulfs of glowing cinnabar,
Where sinks the painted moon, with prows of orpiment.
There can be no question of workmanlike method and technique. This poet
shirks nothing. He has not, in the latest fad, adopted free verse or other formlessness to save himself the proper poetic travail of rhyming and of metering. And
there are no forced rhymes, but such as fall so naturally as to be a delight to the ear and the understanding at once. That calls not only for skill, but for craftsmanlike devotion, for soul-searching and self-discipline, and for conscience in execution, the lack of any trace of which in the submitted work of most amateurs is one of the things that makes editors go mad.
His titles show the attraction of many of the subtleties of life. And then there is the possible loss of identity in death, an idea that has laid its chill hand on the fancy of Bierce and many another. In these exquisite stanzas Smith deals with that frosty theme: A FRAGMENT
Autumn far off in memory,
That saw the crisping myrtles fade! ****
Aeons agone, my tomb was made
Beside the moon-constrained sea.
Ah, wonderful its portals were!
With carven doors of chrysolite,
And wall of sombre syenite
They wrought mine olden sepulchre!
About the griffin-guarded plinth,
White blossoms crowned the scarlet vine;
And burning orchids opaline
Illumed the palm and terebinth.
On friezes of mine ancient fame,
The cypress wrought its writhen shade;
And through the boughs the ocean made
Moresques of blue and fretted flame.
56 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
Poet or prince, I may not know
My perished name, nor bring to mind
Years that are one with dust and wind,
Nor songless love, and tongueless woe—:
Only the tomb they made for me,
With carven doors of chrysolite,
And walls of sombre syenite,
Beside the moon-constrained sea.
Returning to the mundane, here is a song of camel trains in their endless pro-
cessions, processions that have been part of the life of Asia for untold ages:
BEYOND THE GREAT WALL
Beyond the far Cathayan wall,
A thousand leagues athwart the sky,
The scarlet stars and morning die,
The gilded moons and sunsets fall.
Across the sulphur-colored sands
With bales of silk the camels fare,
Harnessed with vermil and with vair,
Into the blue and burning lands.
And, ah, the song the drivers sing,
To while the desert leagues away—
A song they sang in old Cathay,
Ere youth had left the eldest king,—
Ere love and beauty both grew old,
And wonder and romance were flown
On fiery wings to worlds unknown,
To stars of undiscovered gold.
And I their alien worlds would know,
And follow past the lonely Wall,
Where gilded moons and sunsets falls,
As in a song of long ago.
We find in these verses much diction of the rare, the precious, the obsolete, of terms of heraldry and ancient arts. Their strangeness does not greatly help, but if you have acquired such a vocabulary there is an undoubted temptation to use it.
And artistically used it does help some—give a note of gems in embroidery, that is rich and Oriental. There are such words as queach, irrison, lote, wyvers, flaffling, eidolon, prore, terebinth, fulvous, levins, fulgor, vair, nenuphar. Of course, Intelli-
Contemporary Reviews of Clark Ashton Smith
57
gent Reader, you know all those; down to nenuphar. But do you know what a
nenuphar is? Now, as Ingersoll used to plead with his audiences, be honest. Do
you? When I first read of one in Smith’s verses I thought it would be fine to have a little tame nenuphar running about the yard to welcome me when I came home,
but when I consulted the dictionary to see what sort of dog-house to build for it I found it was a water lily. I never did have any luck with pets.16
Clark Ashton Smith is already one of the best working poets between the two
oceans. It is not too much to put him in a class with Bliss Carman and William
Rose Benèt, both of whom he excels in the quality of imaginative splendour, al-
though his contacts with life are less, and he has not yet arrived at much realism in subject matter. Call him rather a master of abstract verse, or pure poetry, in the sense that it is that alone. And perhaps that is rather compliment than criticism, and I hope it is. One of the most exquisite poems in the language (Bierce thought it the most nearly perfect) is “Kubla Khan,” which isn’t “about” anything in particular that any one ever experienced—yet the damsel with a dulcimer, singing of Mount Abora, which probably has no existence, and certainly the damsel never
did, haunts the mind like a vision of that Paradise with which the fragment ends.
And there is the wizard spell of Keats, a spell which, if it once seizes you, you can never be shaken off, those “magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” If you could hold Keats up about it and demand to know
“What de yeh mean by it?” he would probably say he meant nothing at all except
to create one of those things of beauty which are a joy forever; wherein he certainly succeeded, and so does Clark Ashton Smith. And yet that Keats line is totally irrelevant and immaterial and without legal force or effect. No, pure poetry does not have to be related to sociology, or investment banking, or glandotherapy, or the labor movement, or the petroleum output, or anything like that, and therein is its pricelessness. The spirit must be fed on the bread of beauty, or it dies. So let us thank Clark Ashton Smith for so featly purveying it.
The volume includes “The Hashish-Eater, or The Apocalypse of Evil,” a tour
de force of visualization and blazing imagery, running for several pages apace with that remarkable poem, “A Wine of Wizardry,” by his friend, Sterling. With its
“marble apes,” and its “war of pygmies, met by night, with pitter of their drums of parrot’s hide,” it is supremely well done—if you like that sort of thing: the sort of thing which, in prose, made Vathek, and some part of the Arabian Nights. It is as splendid and as colorful as any Oriental weave. But to most of us earth-bound
peoples it is a bit too far removed from any real experience to get a fast grip. It is a splendid gem, but it has in it neither sorrow nor joy nor dread nor pity—and still it is compelling for the brilliance of its fantasies.
These are the workings of a soul still somewhat apart; without the grasp of
Edgar Lee Masters on the village scandals which by so many young philosophers
are held to reveal “life.” And Heaven be praised for it! Yet Clark Ashton Smith should, and I believe in time will, come into closer touch with real things, to move
58 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS
us even more deeply. It is his job. When he does it he may stand with Poe, and if he does that we shall owe him more, for of Poe there is too little, whereas Smith is
industrious. Already he has to his credit The Star-Treader, including “Nero,” which alone would be a good grist for so young a miller. He has several years between him and thirty.
Ebony and Crystal was printed by the Auburn Journal. It is limited to 500 copies and can be obtained, at present, for $2. If you love poetry, this is it.
[William Foster Elliot.] “A California Poet. Clark Ashton Smith of Auburn Reveals Unusual Talents in New Volume.” Sacramento Bee (30 December 1922): 26.17
A volume has just been issued from the press of the Auburn Journal which makes
two distinct demands upon the sympathies of western poetry lovers. First, and
vastly the more important, is the quality of the verse which this book contains; but when that has been duly appraised it cannot fail to one’s pleasure to know that the author is a Californian.
Clark Ashton Smith lives at present on a ranch near Auburn. He has already
published one volume of verse, The Star-Treader and Other Poems, and his work is known to the discriminating. George Sterling stands godfather to the present volume with a preface in which he does not hesitate to use terms of the highest praise.
There have been times when a similar combination of events would have turned
many feet toward Auburn. Today one may hope that a few hearts may be inclined
in that direction.
For the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith is authentic poetry, of which there is
not enough in the world at any one time to permit one to regard an addition to the supply as an ordinary event. This young man (he is still under thirty) has had one love whom he has worshipped and one allegiance which he has served. He has
condescended neither to the theories of revolutionists nor to the sentimentalities of the mediocre. Beauty has been his goddess; he has served her singly, with unbi-ased heart and unremitting ardor; and the result of this service lies in Ebony and Crystal, plain to be seen of eyes which have sought her also.
————————
All classifications are important, but for some convenience some lines must be
drawn, if for nothing else, to do away with the necessity for long winded description. Poetry may be roughly classified under three principal heads. There is the poetry of the heart, of the head, and of both. None of the three kinds is ever found quite pure except the third, and here there is seldom a perfect balance; but the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith is as nearly pure as things are apt to be in this hetero-geneous world, and it is of the second kind.
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