The Complete Poetry and Translations of Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith was one of the most remarkable and distinctive American poets of the twentieth century. His nearly 1000 original poems written over more than fifty years are of the highest craftsmanship, and run the gamut of subject matter from breathtaking "cosmic" verse to plangent love poetry to pungent satire to delicate imitations of Japanese haiku. This first volume includes poetry from the first two to three decades of Smith's career, when he published such noteworthy...
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Clark Ashton Smith was one of the most remarkable and distinctive American poets of the twentieth century. His nearly 1000 original poems written over more than fifty years are of the highest craftsmanship, and run the gamut of subject matter from breathtaking "cosmic" verse to plangent love poetry to pungent satire to delicate imitations of Japanese haiku. This first volume includes poetry from the first two to three decades of Smith's career, when he published such noteworthy volumes as The Star-Treader (1912), Ebony and Crystal (1922), and Sandalwood (1925). Smith's early work was written under the tutelage of the celebrated California poet George Sterling, but Smith quickly surpassed his mentor in the writing of cosmic and lyric verse. Smith's greatest poetic triumph, perhaps, was The Hashish-Eater, a poem of nearly 600 lines that strikingly evokes the myriad suns of unbounded space and the baleful monsters that may lurk therein. This edition prints, for the first time, Smith's entire poetic work, including hundreds of uncollected and unpublished poems. The poems have been arranged chronologically by date of writing, and extensively annotated by editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz.