The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies Read Online Free

assembling the large volume, selecting poems from his previous volumes, significantly rewriting a number of early poems, and adding new ones, including poems written in French and Spanish, as well as a large batch of haiku that he had written in 1947 . But Arkham House’s always perilous finances prevented the issuance of the volume until 1971 .
    Poetry, indeed, was clearly Smith’s first love, and after his virtual abandonment of prose fiction he reverted to it sporadically but effectively in the 1940 s and 1950 s. In 1938 he had met the poet Eric Barker and his wife, the dancer Madelynne Greene; their repeated visits led to a close friendship and to Smith’s assembling a brilliant cycle of love poems,
The Hill of Dionysus.
A selection appeared posthumously in 1962 . Smith was little inclined to write fiction, although Derleth managed to persuade him to write the effective science fiction tale “Phoenix” for the anthology
Time to Come
( 1954 ).
    In late 1954 , Smith met Carol Jones Dorman, and after a brief romance they married on November 10 , 1954 . The couple alternated between Smith’s home in Auburn and Carol’s home in Pacific Grove until the former was burned by an arsonist in late 1957 . Smith died on August 14 , 1961 , of a stroke.
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    As with Lovecraft, the resurrection of Smith’s reputation rested with his friends and disciples. Derleth had done yeoman’s work in collecting Smith’s fiction, and these volumes were later reprinted in England by Neville Spearman (hardcover) and Panther Books (paperback). Lin Carter, a fantasist whose work is heavily influenced by Smith, issued several volumes of tales in his Adult Fantasy series published by Ballantine, but they sold poorly. Donald Sidney-Fryer edited three volumes of paperback editions of Smith’s tales for Pocket Books in the early 1980 s. Arkham House lent a hand by issuing a major retrospective volume,
A Rendezvous in Averoigne
( 1988 ). Many foreign-language editions appeared beginning in the 1970 s, first in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and later in Finnish, Greek, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages.
    By this time a cadre of Smith scholars began probing his work more profoundly. Smith himself had maintained that, when he came to issue his stories in book form, he would restore the cuts and other editing that he had been compelled to make for sale to the pulp magazines, but he inexplicably failed to do so when he assembled his tales for Arkham House. After Smith’s papers were deposited at the John Hay Library of Brown University, the Smith scholar Steve Behrends consulted manuscripts of his tales and issued a succession of slim pamphlets presenting restored editions of several Smith stories. This work was continued by Scott Connors and Ron Hilger in their landmark five-volume edition of Smith’s
Collected Fantasies
( 2006 – 10 ). Meanwhile, David E. Schultz had been spending decades gathering Smith’s published and unpublished poetry, and, with my collaboration, he edited Smith’s
Complete Poetry and Translations
in three volumes ( 2007 – 8 ). Smith’s prose poems, essays, and letters have also been published, and more editions are in the works.
    Smith’s final place in the history of both American poetry and the literature of fantasy has yet to be determined, but that he has an honored place is without question. It would be narrow and simplistic to maintain that he merely created a succession of fantasy realms as an escape from “real” life and its concerns; in fact, those realms serve as the backdrop for keen investigations of human emotions—the poignancy of loss in “Xeethra,” the inescapable lure of the bizarre in “The City of the Singing Flame,” the soul-annihilating terror of an encounter with the utterly alien in “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” and so on. Like Lovecraft, Smith believed that