Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt fromThe Lyric West, Volume 1 [1921]
It is our privilege to publish the poems of Clark Ashton Smith. At nineteen, Mr. Smith won for himself countless friends and admirers by his first volume, "The Star-Treader and Other Poems." George Sterling pronounced him "One of the greatest juvenile geniuses in literature." Critics have been waiting eagerly for his later work, but he has been silent for a long time. The strange beauty of the lines with which The Lyric West brings him once more before his public shows a deepening of power.
Another oneCurrent Opinion, Volume 54 [1913]
There are two new poets just emerging in our sky. One of them is a beardless lad of nineteen years who hails from a little town (Auburn) in California. Another is a girl of twenty who dwells in a small city in Maine, where she pushes aside the stars and communes with infinity. Clark Ashton Smith has just had his first volume, "The Star Treader and Other Poems," published in Salt Francisco (A. M. Robertson). Edna St. Vincent Millay has been exciting wondering comment with her poem "Renascence," in "The Lyric Year." There are mathematicians in plenty who can calculate the orbit of a comet and tell you just where it will be a hundred years from now. But where is the critic keen enough to calculate the flight of imagination and tell us just where in the heavens these two youthful prodigies will be shining a dozen years hence?
We quote two of the sixty poems from Mr. Smith's volume, and these are not the most ambitious of his efforts either:
THE CLOUD ISLANDS.
What islands marvelous are these
That gem the sunset's tides of light-
Opals aglow in saffron seas?
How beautiful they lie, and bright,
Like some new-found Hesperides!
What varied, changing, magic hues
Tint gorgeously each shore and hill!
What blazing, vivid golds and blues
Their seaward winding valleys fill!
What amethysts their peaks suffuze!
Close held by curving arms of land
That out within the ocean reach,
I mark a faery city stand,
Set high upon a sloping beach
That burns with fire of shimmering sand.
Of sunset-light is formed each wall;
Each dome a rainbow-bubble seems;
And every spire that towers tall
A ray of golden moonlight gleams;
Of opal flame is every hall.
Alas! how quickly dims their glow!
What veils their dreamy splendors mar!
Like broken dreams the islands go.
As down from strands of cloud and star
The sinking tides of daylight flow.
RETROSPECT AND FORECAST.
Turn round, O Life, and know with eyes aghast
The breast that fed thee-Death, disguizeless, stern;
Even now, within thy mouth, from tomb and urn,
The dust is sweet. All nurture that thou hast
Was once as thou, and fed with lips made fast
On Death, whose sateless mouth it fed in turn.
Kingdoms debased, and thrones that starward yearn,
All are but ghouls that batten on the past.
Monstrous and dread, must it fore'er abide,
This unescapable alternity?
Must loveliness find root within decay,
And might devour its flaming hues alway?
Sickening, will Life not turn eventually,
Or ravenous Death at last be satisfied?