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If so, it will be with considerable interest that the poems of Clark Ashton
Smith will be discovered. “Here,” they will say, “in the middle of the Age of Naturalism, a man trod on stars and looked beyond the world about him into realms of the imagination. Wholly dissociated from the nervous currents of his period, he had for his only concern the creation of pure poetry. Wholly disregarded by his contemporaries, he can now, with the perspective of history, be recognized as one of the world’s fine poets.”
With that judgement, the life-long devotion of Clark Ashton Smith to the
cause of beauty will be justified and rewarded.
Notes
1. David Warren Ryder, “The Price of Poetry.” Controversy 1, No. 7 (December 1934): 86; online at http://www.eldritchdark.com/bio/price_of_poetry.html.
Communicable Mysteries:
The Last True Symbolist
Fred Chappell
The publication of The Last Oblivion is a singular blessing. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, the volume is subtitled Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith.
Hippocampus Press has brought it out in sturdy paper covers, priced it at $15 , and reproduced four of Smith’s artworks. A bibliography is included, as well as indices of titles and first lines and the editors have contributed a brief but perceptive introduction. There is a helpful glossary of unusual terms like simorgh, cimar, euphrasy, dolent, and so forth.
The poems are divided into seven sections, classified under such rubrics as “The Eldritch Dark,” “The Refuge of Beauty,” and “Medusa and Other Horrors.” The
editors propose that these categories are to be regarded as “suggestive rather than definitive” and that segregating Smith’s more “fantastic” work from the rest “may seem a highly artificial undertaking.” The point is worth making; it may be that all poetry, even the dogged “realism” of George Crabbe and Edwin Markham, belongs
to a species of discourse that is inherently fabulous. The Last Oblivion, then, is a
“sheaf” of Smith’s verses which contains “a more concentrated dose of the weird than others.” The distinction is useful in this application. If one were making a selection of Coleridge’s “fantastic” poems, “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” would be included while “Fears in Solitude” and “France: An Ode” would plausibly be omitted.
But here lies an important difference. The supernatural and fantastic are categories that Coleridge chooses to embrace for specific works, while for Smith they are the usual terms of his literary thought. There are remarkably few of his poems—
mostly amatory and satiric—that do not bear some trace of fantasy or some usage of the language of fantasy. For example, “No Stranger Dream” ( S&P 26) is but a courtly, hyperbolic compliment to a lady’s beauty, yet it includes “flying Lemures”
and “the silver wraith of Baaltis.” It could be argued that a too frequent resort to the terms and tag phrases of fantasy is one of the limitations of Smith’s verse.
I should begin to make it clear that I regard Clark Ashton Smith as a very
good poet. His pages I often return to with a pleasant assurance of enjoyment. Yet I think that some of the praise I would give his work might not find favor with some of his most ardent partisans. Expert, solid, reliable, comprehensible, sturdy: These are perhaps not qualities that we customarily associate with poems titled “Enchanted Mirrors,” “The Witch in the Graveyard,” “The Nightmare Tarn,” and the
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like. For such productions we might expect such adjectives as pavonine, bejeweled, cosmic, phantasmagoric, and, of course, eldritch.
But these sets of qualities are not mutually exclusive.
One of the factors that confuses the situation is Smith’s continuous exoticism.
He loves to pour it on, to “load every rift with ore,” as Keats said, and more than that—to go over the top, as far over the top as possible. The acme and avatar of such excess is, of course, The Hashish-Eater with its sennet-and-tucket opening (“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams”), its kaleidoscopic barrage of garish
images (“The sacred flower with lips of purple flesh”; “deserts filled with ever-wandering flames”; “wreaths of torpid vipers”), its mythological and faery names (Sabaoth, cockatrice, Enceladus, hippogriff), its resounding Miltonics (“demon
tears incessant”) and sudden shifts of perspective, place, and vantage—well, all those devices that make it what it is: a showcase of most of the poet’s strengths and weaknesses, a curio shop window crowded with valuables and dross alike.
The Hashish-Eater, for all its glut and glitter, for all its sumptuous sonorities and all its fame and favor, is not one of Smith’s best works in my judgment and I think that its celebrity may hamper appreciation of some of Smith’s other, better productions. The poet himself complained that it was “much-misunderstood”; the visions described and suggested in the lines were not designed to add up to a colorfully jolly experience. “It is my own theory that if the infinite worlds of the cosmos were opened to human vision, the visionary would be overwhelmed by horror in the
end, like the hero of this poem” ( SL 366). The closure is a calculated but still less than fully effective anticlimax and may owe something to the conclusion of Arthur Machen’s novel, The Hill of Dreams.
The “cosmicism” of Smith’s poetry consists of shifting panoramas and it is a
method he employs often, in short and longish poems alike. The Hashish-Eater only plays out at greater length the techniques that animate “The Star-Treader,” “Ode to the Abyss,” “The Song of a Comet,” “Imagination,” “Saturn,” and others. Even
“Nero,” an interior monologue of that dissipated emperor, is in part a “cosmic”
panorama in which “dust is loosened into vaporous wings / With soaring wrack of systems ruinous.”
This sort of performance at first dazzles but then palls. There is too much of
everything—too many cacophonies of Chaos and enraged suns, too many whelmed
and reeling worlds, too much gigantic legionry, too much bottomless abyss un-
vaulted. Reading these poems is like listening to an orchestra that plays nothing but Wagnerian overtures, every note fortissimo. Smith justifies the inchoate nature of The Hashish-Eater by saying that his visionary is overwhelmed by horror—but isn’t there a possibility that the poet’s cosmic vocabulary was simply used up? Maybe he had ex-pended all his images. I find “Nero” the more effective poem because its phantasmagoric elements proceed from the crazed ruler’s psychology; they pour from a
bizarre but recognizable wellspring. The more famous poem seems to exploit the
drug of its title as an excuse to geyser forth a flood of flimsily connected images.
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But Smith might defend his poem by saying that psychology—no matter how
aberrant—is precisely what he wants to avoid. He complained that the vaunted
freedom of commercial science fiction was illusory, asking “why bother about going to other planets,” if mere human motives are to be the subject matter ( SL 134).
His ambition seems to have been to create a poetry of vatic vision in which the vision itself is identical with the poet. The poet need have no other motive than to articulate the poem, no other personality than what the poem requires for its articulation, and no other presence than a virtual one in a picturesque universe
where, as a seer, he can move about unhindered. This is, at any rate, the role in which the hashish-eater sees himself: “If I will, / I am at once the vision and the seer, / And mingle with my ever-streaming pomps, / And still abide their suzerain” ( LO 19).
For me the smaller works are more successful than the longer. Many of them,
perhaps most, are “cosmic” in the manner of the longer efforts, and that breadth of vision acquires a greater force, is less scattered i
n effect, in the briefer poems.
“In Saturn” offers an example of cosmicism, all the more fantastically suggestive because of its restraint:
Upon the seas of Saturn I have sailed
To isles of high primeval amarant,
Where the flame-tongued, sonorous flowers enchant
The hanging surf to silence; all engrailed
With ruby-colored pearls, the golden shore
Allured me; but as one whom spells restrain,
For blind horizons of the somber main
And harbors never known, my singing prore
I set forthrightly. Formed of fire and brass,
And arched with moons, immenser heavens deep
Were opened—till above the darkling foam,
With dome on cloudless adamantine dome,
Black peaks no peering seraph deems to pass
Rose up from realms ineffable as sleep!
( LO 40)
This poem does not careen around the zodiac, presenting a travelogue of purple
worlds populated by lunar wizards, but still it manages to produce an impression of otherworldliness that lingers like the echo of an English horn berceuse. “In Saturn” contains a number of Smith’s customary tropes: mythological blossoms
(“amarant”), supernatural beings (“seraph”), and enchantment (“one whom spells
restrain”). It also presents his familiar speaker, the poet who is one with his poem in the quest for some ultimate vision.
The figure of the seraph occurs now and again in Smith’s lines and there
seems no reason to think it connected with the traditional religious symbol, the an-
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gel with three pairs of wings as mentioned in Isaiah 6:2. It is only a skyey supernatural being that belongs with Smith’s general muster of like creatures: vampires, female giants, Titans, colossi, and, above all, demons. These figures are as customary in the poetry as are certain touchstones of this poet’s diction—“gibbous,” for instance, and “eldritch,” “Cimmerian,” “accurst,” and “immemorial.” We might
extend the lists of supernatural figures and frequent adjectives, yet we would still observe that for a poet so reputedly “cosmic” the store of motifs and images is severely limited.
I would not attribute this limitation to lack of imagination. It seems instead a meditated choice, a self-imposed set of boundaries within which Smith plays a subtle, arcane, and continual game. His wyverns, sorcerors, eremites, and paladins—
even his gulfs, voids, and abysses—are like pieces on an onyx-and-ivory chessboard to be moved into assigned positions as the separate strategies of the poems dictate.
Like certain other poets, Clark Ashton Smith creates a little universe, sufficient unto itself, with each poem he writes. This is not the case with all poets; William Carlos Williams makes a poetry that, being insufficient in its proper self, requires readers to supply its sphere of actuality from their own “realistic” experiences. Williams’s poems are often powerful isolated moments, but there is no coherence between them; there is instead a purposeful incoherence. “No ideas but in things.”
But Smith’s poems do add up to a coherent pattern, a vision that for all its
scope and variety is isomorphic in its constituent parts. Taken together, almost all these poems would compose an artificial universe. The ideal of a self-enclosed, hermetic universe purely visionary, impervious to the sordidness and distractions of daily life, was one to which the great French Symbolist writers aspired. Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry—these writers and a
host of lesser ones strove to contrive a kind of poetry that would draw a reader into a sphere of discourse in which every element was poetry. Whatever was absorbed from the outer, quotidian world would become transfigured—
transubstantiated, if you will—into a completely poetic substance. They desired to create a poetry so integral, so complete in its vision, that it would be able to supplant the dull, often seemingly meaningless, world that most of us have been sentenced at birth to endure.
So if the phrase, “a silver trance,” and the compound adjective, “dusky-
purple,” that appear in “The Moonlight Desert” might also plausibly appear in
“The City of the Titans” and “Saturn” and “In Slumber” and in a dozen others, it is not because the poet ran short of fresh verbiage. It is because all the poems belong to the same mode of “enchanted” discourse, whatever the occasional and os-
tensible subjects they undertake separately. Almost any poem by Smith brings us into the whole universe of all his poetry.
It was not whimsy nor his affection for exoticism that led Smith to title his 1958
collection Spells and Philtres. I believe that he hoped to cast, as a wizard casts with
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his magical incantations and concoctions, a more-than-verbal enchantment over
his readers, following Symbolist tradition. This volume contains, as did his 1925
Sandalwood, a selection of translations from the onlie begetter of French Symbolism, Baudelaire, and there are poems of his own which clearly show strong influence. “Didus Ineptus,” for example, is a re-figuration of Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros,”
while “The Pagan” and “The Barrier” take their lineaments from Mallarmé’s
“L’Après-midi d’un faune.” The Symbolists too used certain words and phrases
again and again to sustain their enclosed poetic spheres; where in Smith we find
“wizardry,” “oubliette,” and “effulgent,” in Baudelaire we find “ennui,” in Verlaine
“sanglot,” in Valéry “azur.”
Smith’s relationship with French Symbolism seems almost preordained. Al-
though his more learned colleague and admirer, George Sterling, helped to foster his interest and to encourage it, Smith was so taken with the idea of Baudelaire that he began to “translate” his work even before he could read the language. In a 1925
letter to Sterling he speaks of diverting himself by “paraphrasing a few of the Baudelaire translations by F. P. Sturm and others.” He compares his version of a stanza of “The Remorse of the Dead” with Sturm’s and then says, “I’ve never seen the original; but it seems to me that my version is more Baudelairean. B. might have written something of the sort” ( SL 74).
It was cheeky of the young poet to suppose that he might come closer to the
spirit of Baudelaire by strength of empathy than might a translator familiar with the language. Yet it is not his lack of familiarity with French that produced such infe-licities as “lovely knees enorme” in “La Géante” or the dreadful rendering of the opening of “L’Aube Spirituelle” (“Quand chez les debauches l’aube blanche et
vermeille / Entre”) as “When comes upon the sot the scarlet-sworded morn” ( S
40). These errors and some others proceed from a testiness about what he considered a prissy watering-down of Baudelaire by timid translators. This belief could lead him to inventive, overly compensatory excesses, such as supplying to “La Vie Anterieure” “the full bosom of a golden slave” and the suggestion of baroque sexual amusements, “sable queens invented / Fantastic love to tease my weary woe.”
The original is none so spicy:
C’est là que j’ai vécu dans les voluptés calmes,
Au milieu de l’azur, des vagues, des splendeurs
Et des escalves nus, tout impregnés d’odeurs,
Qui me refraîchissaient le front avec des palmes,
Et dont l’unique soin était d’approfondir
Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir.
(There I lived within luxurious calmness, / amid azure waves and splendors, / and naked slaves, all bathed with perfumes, // refreshed my forehead with palm fronds; / their only duty was to puzzle out/the unhappy secret that cast me
down.)
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Even so, most of Smith’s versions are at least presentable, usually more grace-
ful (and more accurate!) than those of Arthur Symons. Smith’s versions of “Chant d’Automne” and “Le Léthé” can stand with any I have come across, and some of
his epigrams capture the true Baudelairean spirit, wry and melancholy: “It is a tru-ism of the mystics that ‘as things are above, so are they below.’ This raises a speculation as to just how far above, or how far below, the ecstasy of the mystics has carried them” ( S&P 52).
I have pursued Smith’s peculiar relationship with French Symbolism—tenuous
but passionate, engaged but spottily informed—in order to point toward a diver-
gence that partly accounts for the place that his poetry occupies today.
The French Symbolist movement was waning by the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, though it still had powerful influence in England, Germany, Switzerland, and in certain Latin American countries. In France it began to metamorphose into surrealism, dada, cubism, “pataphysics,” and so forth. These offshoots of the great nineteenth-century movement also had, and still have, strong influence all round the literary world. By reaction as well as by kinship, Symbolism has contributed to the rise of the “language poets” in America and the Oulipo group in
Europe. By absorbing influences from psychology, politics, the plastic arts, anthropology, physics, linguistics, and so forth, Symbolism added to its strengths, varied its aims in a thousand ways, and informed not only poetry but our general culture in a manner that its first proponents could hardly have imagined.
In doing so, it largely gave up the purist nature of its hermeticism; to remain dynamic, it had to bid farewell to its artificial paradises, its ingenious and suggestive emblematic systems, its shadows and censers, its twilights and tone poems, its lan-guid voices and lickerish vampires. It could not withstand the onslaught of two world wars without radical change; no more could the rest of society—except for those poets who had become, because of their fast allegiances, reactionaries. They made a carefully deliberated decision. If Symbolism was ever a valid mode, changes of fashion would not invalidate it. “The forms and themes of poetry do not become outworn or exhausted. The exhaustion is in the individual poets” ( S&P 52).