HOME

Ebony and Crystal

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

Listening:
Continue to listen:    
Preface, by George Sterling (Mike Pelton)
Arabesque (Keith Louis)
Beyond the Great Wall (Keith Louis)
To Omar Khayyam (Thomas A. Copeland)
Strangeness (Sandra Cullum)
The Infinite Quest (Sandra Cullum)
Rosa Mystica (Sandra Cullum)
The Nereid (Sandra Cullum)
In Saturn (Damla Ozdemir)
Impression (Sandra Cullum)
Triple Aspect (Anusha Iyer)
Desolation (Keith Louis)
The Orchid (Amy Gramour)
A Fragment (Anusha Iyer)
Crepuscle (Sandra Cullum)
Inferno (Sandra Cullum)
Mirrors (S.A. Judasin)
Belated Love (S.A. Judasin)
The Absence of the Muse (JudyDerby)
Dissonance (Shakira Searle)
To Nora May French (Anusha Iyer)
In Lemuria (Leonard Wilson)
Recompense (Keith Louis)
Exotique (Leonard Wilson)
Transcendence (Shakira Searle)
Satiety (Anusha Iyer)
The Ministers of Law (Leonard Wilson)
Coldness (S.A. Judasin)
The Desert Garden (Amy Gramour)
The Crucifixion of Eros (Shakira Searle)
The Exile (Leonard Wilson)
Ave Atque Vale (Leonard Wilson)
Solution (Leonard Wilson)
The Tears of Lilith (Sandra Cullum)
A Precept (MaryAnn)
Remembered Light (MaryAnn)
Song (MaryAnn)
Haunting (MaryAnn)
The Hidden Paradise (Leonard Wilson)
Cleopatra (Leonard Wilson)
Ecstasy (Sandra Cullum)
Union (Amy Gramour)
Psalm (Leonard Wilson)
In November (MaryAnn)
Symbols (MaryAnn)
The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil, Part I (Amy Gramour)
The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil, Part II (Amy Gramour)
The Sorrow of the Winds (MaryAnn)
Artemis (Leonard Wilson)
Love is Not Yours, Love is Not Mine (Sandra Cullum)
The City in the Desert (MaryAnn)
The Melancholy Pool (MaryAnn)
The Mirrors of Beauty (MaryAnn)
Winter Moonlight (MaryAnn)
To the Beloved (MaryAnn)
Requiescat (Leonard Wilson)
Mirage (Leonard Wilson)
Inheritance (Anusha Iyer)
Autumnal (Shakira Searle)
Chant of Autumn (Shakira Searle)
Echo of Memnon (Anusha Iyer)
Twilight on the Snow (Amy Gramour)
Image (MaryAnn)
The Refuge of Beauty (MaryAnn)
Nightmare (Anusha Iyer)
The Mummy (Anusha Iyer)
Forgetfulness (Amy Gramour)
Flamingoes (Amy Gramour)
The Chimaera (Sandra Cullum)
Satan Unrepentant (Thomas A. Copeland)
The Abyss Triumphant (Anusha Iyer)
The Motes (Amy Gramour)
The Medusa of Despair (Anusha Iyer)
Laus Mortis (Anusha Iyer)
The Ghoul and the Seraph (Harley James)
At Sunrise (nbvoices)
The Land of Evil Stars (Sandra Cullum)
The Harlot of the World (Anusha Iyer)
The Hope of the Infinite (Anusha Iyer)
Love Malevolent (Anusha Iyer)
Palms (Amy Gramour)
Memnon at Midnight (Anusha Iyer)
Eidolon (Anusha Iyer)
The Kingdom of Shadows (Anusha Iyer)
Requiescat in Pace (Anusha Iyer)
Alexandrines (Anusha Iyer)
Ashes of Sunset (Anusha Iyer)
November Twilight (Amy Gramour)
Sepulture (Anusha Iyer)
Quest (Anusha Iyer)
Beauty Implacable (Anusha Iyer)
A Vision of Lucifer (Anusha Iyer)
Desire of Vastness (Anusha Iyer)
Anticipation (Amy Gramour)
A Psalm to the Best Beloved (Anusha Iyer)
The Witch in the Graveyard (Harley James)
The Traveler (Anusha Iyer)
The Flower-Devil (Amy Gramour)
Images (Anusha Iyer)
The Black Lake (Anusha Iyer)
Vignettes (Thomas A. Copeland)
A Dream of Lethe (Anusha Iyer)
The Caravan (Anusha Iyer)
The Princess Almeena (MaryAnn)
Ennui (Thomas A. Copeland)
The Statue of Silence (Anusha Iyer)
Remoteness (Amy Gramour)
The Memnons of the Night (Anusha Iyer)
The Garden and the Tomb (Amy Gramour)
In Cocaigne (Anusha Iyer)
The Litany of the Seven Kisses (Jacquelyn Bengfort)
From a Letter (Jacquelyn Bengfort)
From the Crypts of Memory (Sandra Cullum)
A Phantasy (Anusha Iyer)
The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty (Anusha Iyer)
The Shadows (Thomas A. Copeland)
The audiobook Ebony and Crystal falls under the genres of . It is written by .