Up for sale at Abe, Lovecraft’s poem “Despair” (c. February 1919) in his handwriting and signed.

The back is also interesting, with its address of “Appeal to Reason, Girard, Kans.” In the war years Theodore Roosevelt termed the socialist scandal-sheet Appeal to Reason a… “vituperative organ of propaganda, anarchy and bloodshed.”

But the Encyclopaedia of the Great Plains notes that the newspaper … “lost much of its zeal and readership and wilted under the anti-Red reaction of the early twenties”. Evidently a ‘Book of the Month’ club was then helping the newspaper stay afloat. But one wonders who was so naive as to send the editor of The Conservative (1915-1923) some ‘Book of the Month’ order-sheets for socialist tomes? Anyway, evidently Lovecraft merely considered these to be ‘free stationary’ and wrote on the backs.

The poem appeared in Pine Cones for June 1919, and relates to the severe mental illness of his mother.