The Star-Treader and Other Poems

Here Clark Ashton Smith is digging on the lode of the Romantic poets and tends to write in such celestial abstractions that any modern reader of poetry may find it difficult to stay inquisitive of the text. Nowadays, our cosmopolitan sensibilities demand concrete details with which to correlate to s......more

Smith's apocalyptic pastorals evoke cosmic immensity just as strongly as they do the crushing insignificance of one mopey little man writing weird poetry.......more

This is a collection of dark fantasy, weird, horror based, and romantic poems of Clark Ashton Smith. As a member of the Weird Tales Triumverate with H.P. Lovecraft, I felt compelled to read this. I was also inertested as a poet myself. Since my 'horror' based poetry is minimal compared to other type......more

Considering that Clark Ashton Smith was but nineteen years old when this collection was first published in 1912, it's an astonishingly confident and mature artistic statement. While there are some clunkers in these pages, there are also some truly powerful and memorable verses, such as "Nero", "Retr......more