There is an excellent webpage, Eldritch Dark, that is a repository of all things Clark Ashton Smith. I used it a lot when I was writing Weird Tales of Modernity. I recently watched the documentary Clark Ashton Smith: The Emperor of Dreams (2018, dir. Darin Coelho Spring) which reinvigorated my reverence for Clark Ashton Smith and reminded me of Eldritch Dark. Here is my review on Letterboxd. One of the great things about this Eldritch Dark is that it compiles a lot of Smith's correspondence (among other things).
The first letter in the correspondence section of this webpage is dated October 6th, 1911. Smith would have been 17 at the time he wrote this letter, which was addressed to the poet George Sterling (1869-1926). The entire letter can be accessed here.
In this letter, Smith begins by commenting on a photograph of himself. He states, "To me the eye of a camera always looks like the mysterious, murderous muzzle of a thirteen-inch gun, and I am apt to look like the enemy." Most of the pictures of Smith suggest that the young poet did not enjoy getting his picture taken. He doesn't seem to smile (I don't think it was conventional in the early 20th-century to smile in portrait photos). He tends to look very anxious in his photographs and somewhat put out.
Later in the letter, Smith refers to his poem "The Star-Treader" and admits that he doesn't know what Sterling will think of it. "The Star-Treader" is an excellent, ridiculously ambitious poem. Here is the first stanza:
A voice cried to me in a dawn of dreams,
Saying, "Make haste: the webs of death and birth
Are brushed away, and all the threads of earth
Wear to the breaking; spaceward gleams
Thine ancient pathway of the suns,
Whose flame is part of thee;
And deeps outreach immutably
Whose largeness runs
Through all thy spirit's mystery.
Go forth, and tread unharmed the blaze
Of stars where through thou camest in old days;
Pierce without fear each vast
Whose hugeness crushed thee not within the past.
A hand strikes off the chains of Time,
A hand swings back the door of years;
Now fall earth's bonds of gladness and of tears,
And opens the strait dream to space sublime.
This is such a fever-dream, mind-blasting vision. The poet is basically being hailed by the cosmos. The cosmos is telling the poet that the time has come for them to cast off their earthly form and reunite with eternity, rendered as "the blaze of stars." The rest of the poem is really intriguing and it's worth reading in its entirety. But this first stanza gives you a good sense of the scope of Smith's artistic enterprise. It often seems that being a mere human (a dirt person), for Smith, is a prison. Humans are detached from the cosmos in a tragic way. We are eternal souls that have somehow fallen into a prison of ephemeral form and the poet and artist feel the constraining nature of this ephemeral form most acutely.
Later in this letter, Smith discusses a few of his other poems and shares a few observational lyrics with Sterling. One lyric is titled "Wind Ripples." It is very different than "The Star-Treader." Here it is:
Did Beauty's unseen spirit pass
With tread unstayable and fleet?
Surely I saw the crested grass
Bow 'neath supernal feet!
This is a beautiful little poem, iambic tetrameter, with an abab rhyme scheme. The speaker has felt the caress of the wind and imagines that an invisible angel is passing near them. It's really fascinating that Smith could just write a lyric like this with little effort. I also like the idea of observational lyrics. Poets are basically acutely sensitive sensoriums who, unlike us mere mortals, make interesting and unique observations, and the genre of observational poetry clarifies this fundamental role.
I would also argue that this random four-line observational lyric is almost the inverse of Smith's poetic enterprise in "The Star-Treader." Where an ephemeral lyric written in a letter is meant to be low-stakes and effortless, "The Star-Treader," is highly intentional and structured. It's like an oracle prophesying or a spell being cast.
The letter concludes with Smith discussing one of his poems, "Abyss," which I think is a shortened title referring to "Ode to the Abyss." Commenting on how a certain reader didn't grasp the theme, Smith states to Sterling, "I am astonished to find how few really grasp the sublimity and vastness of the stars and star-spaces." Smith certainly grasped the sublimity and vastness of stars and star-spaces, but his observational lyric, "Wind Ripples," also clarifies that Smith could attend to more granular elements of the human experience, i.e., the hidden beauty of a caress of the wind.
There is a lot in this letter and worth reading and pondering over. Eldritch Dark is a wonderful website, and I'm glad it exists.
