“RANKED WITH THE IMMORTALS”:

GEORGE STERLING & CLARK ASHTON SMITH

By Leigh Blackmore
© 2006-
For Calenture online magazine
2.047 wds

Many of the great weird fictioneers began their careers wanting to be poets. HP Lovecraft
considered himself to be primarily a poet for many years, presumably on the example of his
literary idol Edgar Allan Poe. Blackwood wrote some poetry, though it doesn’t figure large
amongst his output. Arthur Machen wrote a little poetry, collected in his ORNAMENTS IN JADE. )
Such Arkham House authors as Donald Wandrei, Richard L. Tierney also deserve to be
remembered for their output of weird verse. But most of these writers are more famous for their
fiction.

The case of Clark Ashton Smith is somewhat different, for though he wrote a significant quantity
of weird and sf tales, it is surely his poetry for which he will be best remembered. This is despite
the fact we now live in a world where poetry has fallen so far from grace that even these
illustrious names, fifty years ago still names to conjure with, now mean little to the man in the
street.

We want to look briefly here at the influence of George Sterling upon Smith’s life and work, before
proceeding to some brief comments on a number of poems Smith penned about Sterling. But we
cannot do that without briefly summarising some aspects of Smith’s poetic approach.

As Steve Behrends has pointed out in his Starmont Reader’s Guide study of Smith, Smith was a
traditionalist, his main models being the romanticists: Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire; and
his contemporaries on the West Coast, George Sterling & Ambrose Bierce. Smith considered
Poe, Milton and Keats ‘poets of the very first rank’ He was familiar with the work of Rossetti and
Swinburne, and with Baudelaire (whose “Flowers of Evil” sequence may have partly provided the
inspiration for the subtitle of Smith’s masterwork “The Hashish-Eater” – “”The Apocalypse of
Evil”). “The Hashish-Eater” (1920) – written when Smith was 27 – is an extraordinary work, aptly
referred to by Joshi and Schultz as his “masterpiece of fantasy…perhaps the most sustained
expression of cosmicism in all literature”. (LAST OBLIVION)

“As such”, writes Behrends, (i.e. as a traditionalist), “Smith aligned himself with a poetic
movement whose day had passed and which had been superseded by the modernist work of T.S.
Eliot, E.E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound (Behrends p. 94) But Joshi and Schultz have written that
Smith “draws upon, and thereby extends, the heritage of English and American poetry – from
Milton to Swinburne, from Shelley to George Sterling – thus linking himself with poetic history in a
way that makes his Modernist contemporaries and successors seems hollow and rootless” (LAST
OBLIVION p.

There is no doubt that Smith was himself a poetic prodigy “on the order of Keats and Shelley”
(LAST OBLIVION p. 9) and also, unfortunately, that this career was “unremunerative” (LAST
OBLIVION p. 10).

As to Smith’s worldview, Scott Connors has commented that Smith’s own version of Cosmicism
differed greatly from Lovecraft's, since like Machen he rejected materialism and embraced a
neoplatonic worldview while, like Lovecraft, rejecting a homocentric viewpoint, preferring an
"imaginative escape from the human aquarium." In many ways Smith's aesthetic represents the
midpoint between those of Lovecraft, the materialist, and Machen, the mystic.
(www.eldritchdark.com A Machen review of Clark Ashton Smith”. )

It seems odd that Smith has not been more lauded in Europe. The route for Poe was first to be
lauded in Europe by Baudelaire and others before finally receiving acclaim in his own country.
Lovecraft, too, has been analysed, and taken up by the French and the Italians, whereas the cult
of Smith is still miniscule, confined largely to the USA and to a small group of cognoscenti. In an
essay in The Overland Monthly, Donald Wandrei praised Smith as worthy to rank with the
immortals, those being the immortals of romantic and decadent poetry– Keats, Byron, Shelley,
Poe, and Baudelaire.

Behrends points out that most of Smith’s poems are conventional in form and metre, (he uses
blank verse, sonnets etc) and draw heavily upon classic imagery – he has a fascination with
classic myth and fable. Prominent themes include loss; reality and illusion; reincarnation; love;
and weariness, sorrow and bitterness. The macabre and fantastic poetry is predominated by a
spectral mood. There are also nature studies, philosophical pieces and a few erotic works, but
many of the poems are extravagantly colourful and imaginative.

As Joshi and Schulz have pointed out, “the compressed brilliance, the imaginative range, and the
verbal and metrical panache of Smith’s odes, sonnets and lyrics” are significant, but “the lushness
and complexity of this kind of poetry make most members of the general literary community likely
to pass it off unthinkingly as either esoteric or passé.” (LAST OBLIVION p. 11)

George Sterling (b. 1869) was a pupil and friend of Ambrose Bierce. Smith made contact with
Sterling in 1911 at the age of eighteen, when some of his poems were sent to Sterling for
criticism. Sterling was already a well-known West Coast poet and would become the young
Smith’s mentor, friend and supporter for the next fifteen years. With Sterling’s constructive
comments on the poems, Smith made several trips to San Francisco and Carmel to visit the older
poet.

Sterling’s extraordinary poems “The House of the Orchids” (1909) and “Wine of Wizardry” (1909)
can now be found on the World Wide Web, respectively at
http://www.idiom.com/~cxarli/english/sterling/orchids/horchids.html and
http://angelfire.com/journal/chrismayou/poem2.html.- the latter, of course also in S.T. Joshi’s
recent edition of Sterling’s poems, THE THIRST OF SATAN.

“The House of Orchids”, in describing vari-coloured orchid blooms, is full of references to Grecian
myth (‘[Lesbian valleys’, ‘Echo and the silver-footed fays’), gods and goddesses of various
cultures – Astarte, Lilith, Circe, Persephone, Aphrodite, Adonis. Sterling’s is a poetry extolling
strange beauty:

“That Beauty’s flaming hands could shape in bloom

So marvellous and delicate designs.
The vision here that shines
Seems not a fabric of our mortal day
And Nature’s tireless loom,
By custom long defiled,
But symbol of a loveliness supreme,
A god’s forgotten dream
In alabaster told by elfin skill
In caverns underneath a haunted hill,
Or in some palace of enchantment hewn
From crystal in the twilights of the moon,
Where white Astarte strays
And Echo and the silver footed-fays
Make alien music, fugitive and wild.”

Sterling’s imagery is capable of ranging from the most ethereal:

“In evenings when the moon,

A sorceress who steals in white
Along the cloudy parapets of night,
In every glade her ghostly pearl hath strewn”.

To the darkly morbid or decadent:

“Yet as with blood thy bosom gleams;

Red as Adonis’ wound it seems,
By Syria mourned of old,
Or scarlet lips that drink from bowls of jade
Slowly, an ivory poison, sweet and cold…”

“A Wine of Wizardry” takes these qualities even further, in a sustained flight of imagination quite
extraordinary in its breathtaking beauty mingled with the outré. Smith’s own favourite passage
from “Wine” was the following, which exemplifies these qualities:

“Within, lurk orbs that graven monsters clasp;

Red-embered rubies smolder in the gloom,
Betrayed by lamps that nurse a sullen flame,
And livid roots writhe in the marble’s grasp,
As moaning airs invoke the conquered rust
Of lordly helms made equal in the dust.
Without, where baleful cypresses make rich
The bleeding sun’s phantasmagoric gules,
Are fungus tapers of the twilight witch
(Seen by the bat above unfathomed pools)
And tiger-lilies known to silent ghouls,
Whose king hath digged a somber carcanet
And necklaces with fevered opals set”.

Smith read “A Wine of Wizardry” as his first sample of Sterling’s work, in the pages of
Cosmopolitan magazine. He described it as having “necromantic music, and splendours as of
sunset on jewels and cathedral windows”. (“George Sterling: An Appreciation” in Sterling,
THIRST OF SATAN).

Under the tutelage of George Sterling, Smith’s poetry blossomed, though it must be said that
Smith’s imaginative gifts were all his own. Indeed, Sterling felt that Smith’s talents may have
outstripped his own.

In his essay in recollection of his mentor, Smith writes that “I feel that there is really little that need
be said”, except that Smith defends Sterling’s right to have committed suicide, an act which had
been complained of by some “smug critics”. Smith, though he didn’t have the suicidal inclinations
of so many of the California Romantics (Sterling was not the only one to commit suicide – another
was poetess Nora Mae French), felt impelled to defend his mentor’s decision to end his own life.

The Roy A. Squires publication To George Sterling contains five poems dedicated by Smith to
his mentor. Three, all alike titled “To George Sterling” appear to date as early as 1910 or 1911
when Smith was in his early teens. The longest, titled “To George Sterling: A Valediction” was
evidently written after Sterling’s suicide in 1926, as was an early variant of that beginning “Deep
are the chasmal years”. “A Valediction” compares those who have been left behind to all kinds of
foul creatures: dogs, wine, fetid-fingered ghouls, apes, pigs, ‘vultures of the soul’, by comparison
to Sterling, whom Smith holds “a lyric god”; Smith’s paean to Sterling is lofty in its language:

“They have no wings to follow thee, whose flight is furled

Upon oblivion’s nadir, or some lost demesne
Of the pagan dead, vaulted with perfume and with fire,
Where blossoms immarcescible in vespertine
Strange amber air suspire.”

Sterling’s name, sings Smith “shall linger strangely, in the sunset years, as music from a more
enchanted period”. We might well say the same of Smith and his work.

The poem beginning “What questioners have met the gaze of Time” is a sonnet that claims that
Sterling’s fame “mid ruins desolate shall stand unworn, confronting Time in vastness musical,
Like Memnon’s statue staring at the morn”.

The poem beginning “His song shall waken the dull-sleeping throng” is also a sonnet that sings
Sterling’s praises, saying he “soars with Beauty where the Eternal sings…” and concludes
“The tangled webs of mortal death and Change
Perish before his chanting lyric fire
That gleams in the paling light of sinking suns”

The six-stanza poem that begins “High priest of this our latter Song” is Smith humbly praising his
mentor by diminishing the importance of his own voice saying that his own poetry cannot match
that of Sterling:

“Yet though I breathe a fainter tone,

And bring to Beauty’s deathless shrine
A lesser offering than thine,
Whose blooms in loftier soil are grown,”

Yet perhaps his own attempts are not futile:

“Mayhap the note that I have sung

Obedient to the Muse’s call,
Is not in vain…”

The poem beginning “Deep are the chasmal years and lustrums long” is a sad paean to the
passing of Sterling and his unique talent, with imagery regarding Sterling having built his crag-
founded…Aeolian domes of song” beside the sea (the “lulling foam’s extremes”). A melancholy
tone pervades the poem, especially the ending:

“Strange shells are found along that silent strand:

Thou too hast often held them to thine ear
And heard the baffled murmur of thy blood.”

We can see in these paeans to Sterling’s poetic genius a continuity of devotion on the part of
Clark Ashton Smith, from the early verses penned in admiration of Sterling as the legitimate
successor of the Poe-Baudelaire symbolist tradition in macabre verse, and as Smith’s guiding
light in his early poetic career. The esteem in which Smith always continued to hold Sterling can
be sensed in the deep feeling behind the last poems, when Smith was a man and had
established himself as a poet with his own great strengths. At the last, Smith still held Sterling to
be one of those who had heard poetry’s song, one who wrote verse because he loved it, and
couldn’t help but sing the world in the way he saw it to be.
References

Behrends, Steve. CLARK ASHTON SMITH. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990.

Schultz, David E. & Scott Connors (eds). SELECTED LETTERS OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH.
Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003.

Smith, Clark Ashton. THE LAST OBLIVION: BEST FANTASTIC POEMS OF CLARK ASHTON
SMITH. Ed. By S.T. Joshi & David E. Schultz. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002.

Sterling, George. THE THIRST OF SATAN: POEMS OF FANTASY AND TERROR. Ed by S.T.
Joshi: NY: Hippocampus Press, 2003.