H.P. Lovecraft to Kliener, February 1920…<\/p>\n
“McD. has just sent me a card calling my attention to an article on him [H. Rider Haggard] in The Living Age<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Living Age<\/em> 1844-1941<\/a> is being newly uploaded to Archive.org from microfilm, and has just reached 1921 complete. Thus this perceptive and poetic article can be located in the March 1920 issue<\/a>. It notes a cosmic touch in Haggard…<\/p>\n
He has, indeed, an epic sense which would transcend the limits of our mundane vision and open out perspectives of some super-terrestrial landscape. There is about it a curious, indefinable quality, something of the twilight, more perhaps of the night: a night when summer lightning is abroad, when the stars seem alternately to approach and to recede from the atmosphere of earth. For it conveys, to me at least, a peculiar sense of the Infinite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Living Age<\/em> was presumably a title Lovecraft had access to via the Providence Public Library, but at time of writing he had not yet browsed the very latest issue there.<\/p>\n
In the same month Lovecraft’s friend…<\/p>\n
Cook has also been kind, outlining a reading course in Haggard. I shall not tackle the gentleman in question till I am through with Algernon Blackwood, whose rather mediocre fantasies I am absorbing one after another. When I do read [Haggard’s] \u201cShe\u201d, I will report my critical impressions in detail. (February 1920)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He is not known to have actually got around to reading the famous She<\/em> until 1926, in order to write his survey Supernatural Literature<\/em>. It might be interesting to speculate why, with all this prompting, Lovecraft did not read Haggard’s central work at that time. Was Cook’s tour of Haggard so arduous and roundabout, such a tall stack of books, that Lovecraft never got around to She<\/em>? Or did he, and we simply don’t have a record of the matter until 1926?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
H.P. Lovecraft to Kliener, February 1920… “McD. has just sent me a card calling my attention to an article on …<\/p>\n