Star-Treader and Other Poems

Clark Ashton Smith published this collection at nineteen, and the precociousness isn't a curiosity, it's a clarion call. These are poems written by someone who had already drank deep from the wells of Keats and the Arabian Nights, who looked at the modern world and saw only its crumbling edges. The title poem 'Star-Treader' launches itself into cosmic territories: vaulted, defiant, haunted by dead gods and dying stars. Elsewhere, Smith wreaths Greek mythology in melancholia, Aphrodite mourns, Apollo speaks from Delphi's ruins, Pan wanders forgotten groves. This is West Coast Romanticism at its most fevered and beautiful, a young poet reaching backward through centuries to capture something ancient and vanishing. Smith would later become one of the legendary three of Weird Tales, collaborator with H.P. Lovecraft, architect of hyperborean sorcery. But this is where it began: with a teenager writing verses of such dark luminescence that they still burn.