Free The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith

“The Hashish-Eater” has no true parallel in cosmic concept or in sustained power of imagination. It stands alone. Perhaps the closest thing to Smith’s compressed epic is that highly poetic prose-piece in semi-dramatic form by Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine ,—with its saintly anchorite-hero Anthony who undergoes a series of fantasmagoric visions instigated by the Devil to tempt him. Ignoring the over-all differences in narrative-purpose of the two pieces as well as the differences in symbolic intent of the endings of both, yet these endings outwardly do have a considerable resemblance.
    The Poems in Prose which conclude Ebony and Crystal possess a paramount significance in terms of the over-all canon of Smith’s work, for these twenty-nine poems in prose—representing a logical continuation of the thematic material in the preceding poems in verse—lead directly to Smith’s two extended poems in prose of 1925, “Sadastor” and “The Abominations of Yondo,” and on through them to the tales and/or extended poems in prose of 1929–1937. Many of these poems in prose are essentially condensed or implied tales, and two of them, “The Flower-Devil” and “From the Crypts of Memory,” served as the inspiration or nuclei (in regard to the over-all plot, atmosphere and even as to actual phrases) for the later extended poems in prose, “The Demon of the Flower” and “The Planet of the Dead,” respectively. Smith is one of the very, very few poets in English who have fully understood the technique of this difficult and eminently French genre (the poème en prose ) more or less created by Baudelaire (under the dual influence and/or suggestion of that unique collection of prose ballads Gaspard de la Nuit by Aloysius Bertrand, published in 1842, and of such poems in prose by Poe as “Shadow - A Parable,” “Silence - A Fable,” “Eleanora,” and “The Masque of the Red Death”). Indeed, it is not too much to say that as a practitioner of the poem in prose Smith has no peer in English, and that, considering his achievement in this genre from a universal literary viewpoint, he takes equal rank with Baudelaire, the technique of whose Petits Poèmes en prose influenced Smith in the technique of his own. These poems in prose clearly pave the way toward the highly baroque prose of Smith’s later tales and/or extended poems in prose, as of where the latter designation applies. Even if little recognized or heralded, the publication of Smith’s over-all more than forty poems in prose in one volume (the total is now known to be only a little less than sixty) has helped to establish his pre-eminence in the literature of this genre.
    The remarkable love poems in Ebony and Crystal find their complement on an extended scale in the even more remarkable love poems that make up most of Sandalwood , published in 1925, and concluding with nineteen translations from Les Fleurs du Mal of Baudelaire. After the cosmic and exotic splendors of The Star-Treader and Ebony and Crystal , and the oftentimes monumental tone of those two volumes, the tender, muted, vertumnal or gently autumnal tone of this third major poetry collection by Smith, comes as a surprise, almost—paradoxically—as a quiet shock. Many of the love poems, as well as some of the non-love poems, Smith has cast into many beautiful forms of his own invention that suggest the old French forms of the rondeau, the triolet, the ballade, and the villanelle, without actually being the same. The poems in Sandalwood are above all remarkable for haunting song-like effects, with all manner of refrain and echo-like devices. Smith’s successful experimentation with lines of differing lengths and metres suggests on the one hand the similar experimentation by the poets of the Pléïade and on the other the same by the most eminent Elizabethan poet influenced by the Pléïade, Edmund Spenser. Perhaps the single most beautiful and artistic poem in the entire