Michael Dirda

With moon-white nymphs of cypress,

Pale dryads of the yew,

In the tall grass of graveyards

Weighed down with evening's dew.

Not surprisingly, Smith also wrote actual prose poems, modeled in part after those of Baudelaire, and these possess their own faded symbolist beauty. S.T. Joshi points to "The Litany of the Seven Kisses" as his supreme achievement, asserting that "one of its segments -- 'I kiss thy cheeks, where lingers a faint flush, like the reflection of a rose upheld to an urn of alabaster' -- contains what is surely one of the most exquisite images in the entire spectrum of English literature."

That said, many of Smith's themes -- the recurrence of black magic, body doubles, ruins, Faustian pacts, love potions, jewels, despoilment, metamorphosis, threatening vegetation, the cult of antiquity, femmes fatales, vampires and snakes (as Lauric Guillaud conveniently lists them in The Freedom of Fantastic Things) -- may simply sound corny today, whether in prose or verse. Even Jeff VanderMeer, who introduces the Nebraska reprints of Smith's first two major collections of stories, admits to a love-hate relationship with the writer, largely because of his overlush and "hyperelevated" style. And yet without it, Smith couldn't create the dark beauty and alluring otherness of his best work.

If you've never read Clark Ashton Smith before, start with either the collection A Rendezvous in Averoigne or the reissues of Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds. If you are taken with his pensive and idiosyncratic genius, go on to the poetry and letters, as well as the essays about Smith's various imaginary realms -- medieval Averoigne, ancient Hyperborea, sunken Poseidonis, the decadent and depraved Zothique. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com.