Greetings Everyone!
Halloween is over!
Now, it is November, the last of the autumn
months. And we can hear the winter
calling to us—the frosty months of December, January and February—inviting us
to embrace the dark days and the dark nights and to celebrate the coming of a
new year and new light into our lives. The
dark and the light—it is all the same.
It is time, also, to read the great writers of autumn
and winter: H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe.
Hervey Allen, author of Israfel: The Life and Times
of Edgar Allan Poe, describes Poe’s “Ulalume” in the following terms:
“Poe, the poet, personified the constellations,
reading into them an allegory of his soul’s predicament....There was a white,
frosty starlight caught in these lines; a terror of the great caverns of space
haunted by the beasts of the zodiac; an element of irresponsible cosmic will in
the fatal hour marked by the star-dials; a titanic alley of cypress for a
mystic adventure with his own soul in a demon landscape lit by the
star-glimmering, miraculous crescent of the goddess of passion.”
This magnificent description applies not just to
“Ulalume,” but to all of the works of Lovecraft and Poe, for in the prose and
poetry of both visionary writers, there is a fear and a terror of cosmic will,
there is the same demon landscape, and there is the same predicament of the
soul.
JLS
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