In 1924 Lovecraft wrote…

‘Take a werewolf story, for instance — who ever wrote a story from the point of view of the wolf, and sympathising strongly with the devil to whom he has sold himself?’ — H.P. Lovecraft in the letters columns of Weird Tales, March 1924. Quoted in Darrell Schweitzer, Discovering Classic Fantasy Fiction, p.126.

In this respect it’s interesting that a decadent writer called Robert Buchanan published a long decadent poem as a book, The Devil’s Case (1896). In it Buchanan sympathises with the Devil, portraying him both as a magician and a scientist/skeptic. Regrettably for the modern reader it comes with an offputtingly teduous late-Victorian preamble and it has much ‘poeticky’ language, but there are many very effective and vivid passages. Arkham House reprinted one of his long poems, but sadly not this one.

Here is Buchanan’s Devil in The Devil’s Case, recalling his time as a scientist/architect in Ancient Egypt. This would seem to have obvious relevance to “Nyarlathotep” (1920)…

Given Lovecraft’s dislike of 19th century literature it’s perhaps understandable that Lovecraft does not appear to have even known about some of the Victorian fantasy novelists such as William Morris (or possibly he assumed from summaries that they were more like children’s fairy tales, or just felt them not to be weird or horrific enough for mention in Supernatural Literature). But Lovecraft was apparently fairly informed on the Decadents and poetry. Indeed he went through a Decadent “phase” up until about 1922/23. So it seems strange he appears never to have mentioned Robert Buchanan. Archibald Stodart-Walker’s book Robert Buchanan, the poet of modern revolt: an introduction to his poetry had appeared in 1901. Also Harriet Jay’s Robert Buchanan: some account of his life, his life’s work, and his literary friendships had appeared from Unwin in 1903, and Henry Murray’s Robert Buchanan: a critical appreciation, and other essays in 1901 — so it wasn’t as if the author had been forgotten in the 1910s. Much of Buchanan’s early work was conventional, but his The Book of Orm (1870) and especially its section of poems titled “The Devil’s Mystics” might have been on Lovecraft’s list had he read about it. Certainly Orm was described in Chapter 12 of Lafcadio Hearn’s Appreciations of Poetry (1916)…

Buchanan’s Orm is represented to be an ancient Celt, who has visions and dreams about the mystery of the universe, and who puts these visions and dreams, which are Buchanan’s, into old-fashioned verse.

a very remarkable beauty, a Celtic beauty of weirdness [of “The Ballad of Judas Iscariot”]

But Lafcadio Hearn’s essay appears to resolutely steer matters toward the ponderous ‘Christian meanings’, and he very oddly neglects to even mention that Buchanan ever published The Devil’s Case. If this book chapter was all that Lovecraft ever read about or by Buchanan (Hearn gives a large chunk of Judas Iscariot), then it may well have been enough to strike the name off Lovecraft’s list of works to investigate. Still, there does appear to be at least one very striking point of correspondence between the “The Devil’s Case” and “Nyarlathotep” (see above), and also some rather Lovecraftian language in places such as…