Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Candlelight (Arkham House, 1961). Dark of the Moon charts much of the history
of weird poetry with its selections from Blake, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Sir
Walter Scott, Coleridge, Thomas Moore, Goethe, Keats, Thomas Hood,
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Longfellow, Poe, Tennyson, Bell Scott, LeFanu,
William Allingham, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel and Christina), James
Thomson, William Morris and many others of the 19th century and earlier; and
presents selections by such modern craftsmen of the genre as Walter de la
Mare, Robert Frost, Vincent Starrett, HP Lovecraft, the deliciously named
Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Clark Ashton Smith, Stephen Vincent Benet, Frank
B. Long, Francis Flagg, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Mary Elizabeth
Counselman, Leah Bodine Drake , Coleman Roseberger and many more. A
large selection of Wandrei’s “Sonnets of the Midnight Hours” also appeared
in this volume. Fire, Sleet and Candelight focuses on poems written between
1947 and 1961, and so represents the modern weird poets: the inevitable CA
Smith, Joseph Payne Brennan, the underappreciated Texan Lilith Lorraine,
Harold Vinal, Raymond Roseliep, Sydney King Russell, Joseph Joel Keith and
many others. If we think of weird verse in modern times we must also think
of writers such as William Scott Home, G. Sutton Breiding, perhaps of Tom
Piccirilli and Jeff Vandermeer, of such Australians as Christopher Brennan,
Kenneth Slessor and Phillip A. Ellis, and even of Thomas Ligotti (with his
Death Poems). Amongst this varied company, Donald Wandrei looms large.
Wandrei infused the images from his dreams into his poetry as well,
particularly in the cycle or sequence known as “The Sonnets for the Midnight
Hours”. He may be, like H.P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges, one of the
great literary dreamers of the twentieth century. The imagery presented in the
“Sonnets” is bizarre and fantastic in the extreme, and if Wandrei truly
dreamed all these dreams, his sleep was haunted indeed.
The “Sonnets for the Midnight Hours”, of which there are 26 in the
sequence that Wandrei chose to preserve, were all individually inspired by
dreams of Wandrei’s (see Joshi: Sixty Years: 68). The sonnets were composed
in 1927 and initially appeared in Wandrei’s first volume of verse, Ecstasy and
Other Poems (1928), published by W. Paul Cook’s The Recluse Press on the
advice of H.P. Lovecraft. Twelve of the sonnets were published by Weird Tales
between May 1928 and March 1929 (Mysteries p. 204)
Joshi points out that Wandrei’s poems of the “Sonnets” are “unified by
the fact that they are all derived from Wandrei’s dreams and by their
narration in the first person” (A Subtler Magick: The Writing and Philosophy of
H.P. Lovecraft. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 2nd ed 1986: 234) as contrasted
with “utter randomness of tone, mood and import” in Lovecraft’s “Fungi”.
One could readily envisage writing a critical piece about the sequence on this
basis called “The Continuity of the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours”. This quality
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By Jan 14, 1928, Wandrei had sent Cook the final proofs for his first
collection of poetry. At that time he planned to issue a second volume of
poems to be called The Midnight Hours which would have included the sonnet
cycle. However, this proposed volume did not appear. His second collection
of poems, Dark Odyssey (1931), did not contain any of his “Sonnets of the
Midnight Hours”, which ultimately were collected in Poems for Midnight
(1964). (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: 198-99).
sonnets, but Tierney did not designate any such numbered sequence as
Wandrei, Lovecraft and Carter.
Wandrei was an early appreciator of the work C.A. Smith and wrote an
ardent appreciation of it, “The Emperor of Dreams,” which appeared in
Overland Monthly 84, No 12 (Dec 1926), (reprinted in 1988 in the journal
Klarkash-Ton). This essay was an ecstatic paean of praise to Smith’s work, but
it is also highly revealing of Wandrei’s own attitudes to fantastic poetry. “A
poet cannot live on visions, on dreams, on a prospect of future fame. He must
live on something more material. And one cannot write when it is necessary
to earn a sustenance”. “There is no place in contemporary prose and poetry
for genius”. These could be aphorisms representing Wandrei’s general point
of view, and feelings about his own poetic endeavours, not just about Smith.
appreciated in their lifetime, and never have widespread popularity, but the
highest minds of every age enjoy their work. These are ones who speak to us
across the ages, who will speak across the ages to come”. If it be so, then
Wandrei himself may be placed in this category. His verse is carefully
fashioned, form being one of his chief considerations in addition to a
concentration on the outré and the bizarre. Wandrei continues, of Smith’s
poems: “They would have been accomplishments for a man of maturity, for
one who had long written poetry, as the work of a youth they are remarkable
achievements…it was a world-weary youth wise beyond his years who wrote
these poems beautiful, fantastic, sometimes bitter and more than once
inexpressibly terrible in their suggestion.” We cannot fail to see how Wandrei
himself was “a world-weary youth wise beyond his years” – this is certainly
borne out by a reading of his letters to Lovecraft (Mysteries of Time and Spirit).
Who but a fellow poetic soul could have written thusly of Smith: “Here
and there may be found a poppy-flower, an orchid from the hot-bed of Hell,
the whisper of an eldritch wind, a breath from the burnings sands of regions
infernal. The wizard calls, and at his imperious summons come genie, witch,
and daemon to open the portal to the haunted realms of faery; and their
wonder is transmuted so that those who can open the door my listen to the
murmuring waters of Acheron, or watch the passing of a phantom throng;
and the fen-fires gleam; and the slow mists arise; and heavy perfumes, and
poisons, and dank odors fill the air. A marble palace rises in the dusk, a
treasure-house of gold, and ebony, and ivory; soft lutes play within; fair
women, passionless and passionate, wander in the corridors; silks and
tapestries adorn the walls, and fuming censers burn a rare incense” And on
goes the ‘review’, praising Smith in terms which (if lavish) are nonetheless
found to be no exaggeration by connoisseurs of the weird who appreciate
Smith’s exotic and ultramundane worlds.
The influence of both Smith and of his poetic mentor, George Sterling,
are evident in Ecstasy and Other Poems. Yet Wandrei retained a voice all of his
own. Wandrei made explicit his debt to Sterling with the exquisite “In
Memoriam: George Sterling”, a poem written after Sterling’s suicide (Nov
1926):
“He walks where none can know or see,
Alone and far,
A lonely traveller on another star,
A dreamer in eternity,
Whose dream of old is gone
Before the greater dream whose dawn/is night”.
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One can’t help wondering whether Lovecraft was struck by the phrase
“fungi of the moon” and whether it may have partially inspired the actual
title of his “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence. The cosmic view of Sterling and
of Smith, with their visions of the oblivion of worlds, is represented here:
“They gazed on stars that now are dust,
They gorged on wonders vanished, dead
They saw Mercurial cities rust
Beneath twin moons of livid red.”
“The Last Oblivion” was, of course, a sonnet of Smith’s from his 1925
collection Sandalwood, (a volume which Wandrei assisted Smith to finance) so
this is a nice homage from Wandrei.
Wandrei’s poem “The Unknown Color” (one of the Sonnets) may have
anticipated Lovecraft’s story ‘the Colour Out of Space”, with its theme of a
prismatic sentience of unknown origin:
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Colour often features as a theme in Wandrei’s work. From the story “The Red
Brain” to the sonnet “Nightmare in Green”, to “The Five Lords” with its five
colours of doom, Wandrei found colour a potent theme. In the poem “Red”,
the poet’s fascination with the single phenomenon of redness verges on the
monomaniacal fixation of the narrator in Poe’s “Berenice”.
“The roses scented the warm night air, the violets grew in bower and
glade, the fabulous poppies of Paphos budded and bloomed; the maidens
wove garlands of the flowers and put wreaths on their brows; the maidens
wove violets in their hair and strewed petals to the winds and the night and
the great gods Pan, Dionysus, and Aphrodite”.
The narrator of “Somewhere Past Ispahan” is, like des Esseintes, the
anti-hero of Huysman’s Against the Grain, inured to the luxuries that his rich
and decadent lifestyle provides him. Ispahan or Esfahan is an ancient city of
central Iran; at its zenith, under the Safavid dynasty in the 17th cent., Esfahan
had a population of c.600, 000, making it one of the world’s great cities of the
time. The poet is sunk in ennui – indeed, he is even sick of ennui itself:
“I’d be missing
Joys that pass and youth too fleet,
Springtide waning, Beauty sweet,
If I thus forgot to meet
Duty, in her lips caressing!”
S.T. Joshi has aptly pointed out that the central them of Wandrei’s
poetry is that “beauty must die” (a line from “Let Us Love Tonight”.) It was
Poe who, contending that the most powerful emotions to be triggered by
poetry (and art in general) are the joy experienced in perceiving something
beautiful and the sorrow connected with the thought of death, suggested that
the most poetic of all possible subjects was the death of a beautiful woman.
The influence of Keats on Wandrei has often been remarked, and the
Romantic source of this sentiment, may be clearly seen in Keats’ “Ode to
Melancholy”, which concludes:
One of the poems from Barnitz’ book had appeared in The Overland
Monthly where Wandrei had published his appreciation of Clark Ashton
Smith, and Wandrei may have seen this. Certainly he sought out The Book of
Jade at the John Hay library when he visited Lovecraft in 1932. But he had
access to the volume long before this, for he lent it to Clark Ashton Smith in
1925, as we know from Smith’s comments in his letter to Wandrei of July 10
that year: “Dear Mr. Wandrei, I am greatly indebted to you for the loan of the
Book of Jade, which I will return to you in a week or two. You are right about
the mortuary poems being the best: some of them, such as the 'Sonnet of the
Instruments of Death,' 'Sepulchral Life' etc. are truly impressive, and, it seems
to me, very original. There is a tremendous idea in the 'Grotesques,' also, in
the second of the 'Fragments.' In the first section, the sonnet 'Ennui' impressed
me as being perhaps the best, or at last, the most perfect. Ennui and sheer
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In his later years (on his return to Minnesota after WWII), Wandrei’s
life was apparently a mix of uneventfulness and difficulty. Lovecraft had died
in 1937. Donald’s brother Howard died in 1956, his mother sometime later,
and his sister in 1972. His mother and sister had long been confined to
nursing homes and Wandrei had often visited them while they were live.
Clark Ashton Smith died in 1961. Wandrei seems to have missed his family,
and his old literary companions. Marc Michaud declares that “there simply
were not any more like them who could offer to him the intellectual and
artistic stimulation he needed”. (Michaud: 21). In these later years, in which
he became withdrawn, many thought him a shadowy character, and some
believed him dead. A tall, gaunt figure, he lived alone in his home, virtually
the last of his literary species. Klein says he was “reclusive, eccentric and
notoriously difficult” (Klein: 35). He seems to have been a gloomy personality
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in later life: “He seldom looked at the person he was speaking to and barely
raised his voice above a whisper.” (Ruber, 65).
S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have written of CA Smith’s poetry that
“the likelihood that Smith will ever attain widespread recognition for his
poetry is, to be sure, not great. Most members of the literary community have
become so unaccustomed to the lushness and complexity of this kind of
poetry that they are likely to pass it off unthinkingly as either esoteric or
passé” (Joshi & Schultz, The Last Oblivion: 11). The same can be said of
Wandrei. But if we find in Smith compressed brilliance, imaginative range,
and verbal and metrical panache, the same can very much be said of Wandrei.
Wandrei himself, writing of Lovecraft correspondent J. Vernon Shea, said “No
one can predict judgments of the future, either the accolades or the oblivion of
time”. (Afterword, Shea, In Search of Lovecraft). The obscurity into which his
work fell for many years began to be mitigated in the late 1980’s with the
republication of most of his best stories in three volumes from Fedogan and
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Bremer, and with the publication of the letters between him and Lovecraft in
2002 by Night Shade Books.
References
[Barnitz, Park]. http://www.bookofjade.com/
Barnitz, Park. The Book of Jade. London: Durtro Press: 1998. Expanded
reprint of the scarce 1901 edition of decadent poetry, includes a ten-page
introduction by Mark Valentine, and a four-page afterword by Thomas
Ligotti titled ''Thoughts Concerning A Decadent Universe''. (300 numbered
copies printed.)
Behrends, Steve. “Something from Above: The Imaginative Fiction of Donald
Wandrei”. Studies in Weird Fiction 3 (Fall 1988).
Burleson, Donald. Review of The Collected Poems of Donald Wandrei. Studies in
Weird Fiction, 3, (Fall 1988).
Chalker, Jack and Mark Owings. The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A
Bibliographic History, 1923-2001. Westminster, MD: Mirage Press, 1991.
Clute, John and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. UK: Orbit/Little
Brown, 1997.
--- and Peter Nicholls (ed). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. UK: Orbit/Little
Brown, 1993.
ISHS Page 207/03/2009 Blackmore – “Ecstasies & Odysseys: The Weir
Schultz, David E. and Scott Connors (eds). Selected Letters of Clark Ashton
Smith. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003.
Schwarz, Julius and Mortimer Weisinger. “Donald Wandrei” (interview).
Fantasy magazine (May 1934).
Stableford, Brian. “Donald Wandrei” in David Pringle (ed) St James Guide to
Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1998.
Tierney, Richard L. “Introduction”, Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of
Donald Wandrei. Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer, 1999 (2nd expanded
edition).
Wandrei, Donald. “Afterword”. J. Vernon Shea. In Search of Lovecraft. West
Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1991.
--- Collected Poems. Edited by S.T. Joshi. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon
Press, 1988.
--- Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei. Minneapolis, MN:
Fedogan & Bremer, 1999 (2nd expanded edition).
--- Dark Odyssey. St Paul, MN: Webb Publishing Co, 1931.
--- A Donald Wandrei Miscellany. Edited by D.H. Olson. Minneapolis, MN:
Sidecar Preservation Society, 1991; 2nd edition Dec 2001 (100 numbered
copies).
---Don’t Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy Fiction of Donald Wandrei.
Edited by Phillip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler.
Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer, 1997.
--- Ecstasy and Other Poems. [Athol, Mass]: The Recluse Press (W. Paul Cook),
1928.
--- “The Emperor of Dreams”. Klarkash-Ton: The Journal of Smith Studies 1 (June
1988).
--- Poems for Midnight. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964.
--- Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poems and Prose Poems of Donald Wandrei.
Edited by S.T. Joshi. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2007 (forthcoming).
Weinberg, Robert. A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Artists. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.