H.P. Lovecraft’s Slim Purpose
Phillip Ellis Winfield Townley Scott once made the following remark about H. P. Lovecraft’s verse: “To scare is a slim purpose in poetry.” This is true; there is more to weird verse, poetry of fantasy and horror, than shudder-mongering, and there is more to the genre of horror than refining the evocation of physical disgust and revulsion. Part of the problem is that so much of the Lovecraft’s weird verse feels stylistically deriviative of both Swinburne and Poe. It is only relatively rarely that Lovecraft achieves his own style, his own voice technically. One key example of this latter point is…