The Miscellaneous Writings of Clark Ashton Smith by Clark Ashton Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

dimension in the art of the short story: many of the more characteristic tales are actually extended poems in prose in which Smith has united the singleness of purpose and mood of the modern short story (as first established by one of Smith’s literary idols, Edgar Allan Poe) together with the flexibility of the conte or tale; an entire short story being unified and, in part, given its powerful centralization of effect, mood, atmosphere, etc., by a more or less related system or systems of poetic imagery and language (simile, metaphor, archetype or allegory). This ranks as a technical achievement of the first order, although it has received relatively little or no recognition.
    It is indeed fortunate that both Weird Tales and Wonder Stories existed during this period of intense creation in Smith’s life: by providing a more or less ready market for Smith’s stories, they served as the necessary commercial incentive which Smith, genius or not, financially needed. Smith paid tribute to the needed existence of such magazines for writer and reader alike in a letter published in “The Eyrie” in the December 1930 issue of Weird Tales : “Speaking as a reader, I should like to say that Weird Tales is the one magazine that gives its writers ample imaginative leeway. Next to it comes three or four magazines in which fancy can take flight under the egis of science; and after these, one is lost in a Bœotian desert. All the others, without exception, from the long-established reviews down to the Wild West thrillers, are hide-bound and hog-tied with traditions of unutterable dullness.” Hugo Gernsback, the editor of Wonder Stories , appears to have welcomed Smith’s stories quite enthusiastically. However much Farnsworth Wright may have appreciated their literary excellence (Wright himself was a considerable scholar who professionally edited, among other things, a very fine version of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream ), the editor of Weird Tales appears always to have been rather anxious as to how his readers would react to Smith’s extended poems in prose. Undoubtedly this is what caused Smith to publish privately six of his finest tales in his first collection of short stories The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies , in February 1933, at Auburn.
    Outwardly during this period Smith led a quiet, uneventful life. However, in August 1934, Smith successfully fought a severe wood and grass fire on his ranch. All during this time (1929–1937) Smith continued to write verse but necessarily in a much smaller quantity. In 1933, George Work, the author of White Man’s Harvest , and one of the then best-known writers in the country, declared Smith “the greatest American poet of today” whose “poems do not compare unfavorably with those of Byron, Shelley, Keats or Swinburne.” In Controversy for November 1934 appeared the article The Price of Poetry , by David Warren Ryder. In this article Ryder acclaimed Smith as “a great poet” and as being “in our generation… the fittest to wear the mantle of Shakespeare and Keats,” thus adding his considered opinion to the similar one of George Sterling, George Work, and the well-known and respected educator and man-of-letters, Dr. David Starr Jordan, one-time president of the University of Indiana and the first president and “the builder” of Stanford University. Ryder’s article was reprinted in June 1937 to accompany the slender collection Nero and Other Poems , published in the preceding month of May by The Futile Press, Lakeport, California: this volume included ten reprints (somewhat altered from their original versions) from The Star-Treader . Just as the poetry magazine The Step-Ladder had devoted its entire issue of May 1927 to his poems, the California poetry journal Westward in the issue for January 1935 honored Smith by making numerous quotations from poems in The Star-Treader and Ebony and Crystal . This magazine featured in its early issues, at the