Ebony and Crystal
Gelesen von LibriVox Volunteers
Clark Ashton Smith
(5 Sterne; 2 Bewertungen)
As stated in L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse, "Ebony and Crystal is an artist's intrepid repudiation of the world of trolleys and cash-registers, Freudian complexes and Binet-Simon tests, for realms of exalted and iridescent strangeness beyond space and time yet real as any reality because dreams have made them so. Mr. Smith has escaped the fetish of life and the world, and glimpsed the perverse, titanic beauty of death and the universe; taking infinity as his canvas and recording in awe the vagaries of suns and planets, gods, and daemons, and blind amorphous horrors that haunt gardens of polychrome fungi more remote than Algol and Achernar. It is a cosmos of vivid flame and glacial abysses that he celebrates, and the colorful luxuriance with which he peoples it could be born from nothing less than sheer genius.
The summation of Mr. Smith's exotic vision is perhaps attained in the long phantasmal procession of blank verse pentameters entitled, "The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil." In this frenzied plunge through nameless gulfs of interstellar terror the Californian presents a narcotic pageant of poisonous vermilious and paralysing shadows whose content is equalled only by its verbal medium; a medium involving one of the most opulent and fastidiously choice vocabularies ever commanded by a writer of English."
Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as one of the big three of Weird Tales, was a romantic-style poet, a Lovecraftian-style writer and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of the last great West Coast Romantics. Ebony and Crystal, published in 1922, was Smith's last collection of pure poetry.
- Summary by Mary Kay and L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse (3 hr 48 min)
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null
(5 Sterne)
The hashish eater owes a debt to the French Decadents who wrote about fantastic visions and flights of fancy they got from hashish and other drugs, as well as from DrQuincy. Coleridge, though he took only a small doctor prescribed dose of opium, was believed to have seen what he describes in hus fantastic poetry in opium dreams. The most immediate influence is A Wine of Wizardy. I am sure the bohemian Californian probably tried marijuana with some of his artist and poet friends, but a sober mind must have perfected the dense web of allusions and imagery in his poetry.
Some sublime moments!
DrRobbo
(5 Sterne)
This is wonderful poetry- but it's depends so much upon a suitable reader. In this regard- the "Hashish Eater", is the best poem in this collection, and its reader here is wonderful. This rendition alone will change your life forever, as it opens a door to the sublime, to the ineffable pleroma.... Having said this, some of the renditions are very poor, without sense of meter or meaning.....In stercore, est sublimitas.