In conformity with his carefree and rather unsupervised childhood, Lovecraft was allowed ready access to the ‘windowless third-story trunk-room’29 at 454 Angell Street, where the family’s collection of eighteenth-century volumes—then considered outdated and of no contemporary relevance—was stored. Lovecraft took to them eagerly, particularly the volumes of poetry and belleslettres. This eighteenth-century predilection led indirectly to a literary and philosophical interest of still greater importance: classical antiquity. At the age of six Lovecraft read Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), and professed himself ‘enraptured by the Hellenic myths even in their Teutonised form’ (‘A Confession of Unfaith’). From Hawthorne Lovecraft naturally graduated to Thomas Bulfinch’s imperishable retelling of Graeco-Roman myths, The Age of Fable (1855).
Lovecraft finally came upon the ancients themselves around this time, doing so in a way that felicitously united his burgeoning love of classical myth with his already existing fondness for eighteenthcentury prosody. His grandfather’s library had an edition of ‘Garth’s Ovid’—that gorgeous 1717 translation of the Metamorphoses assembled by Sir Samuel Garth, and including contributions from such poets as Dryden, Congreve, Pope, Addison, and Gay. It is not surprising that ‘The even decasyllabic rhythm seemed to strike some responsive chord in my brain, and I forthwith became wedded to that measure.’30
Whipple Phillips also assisted in fostering Lovecraft’s love of Rome: ‘He had loved to muse amidst the ruins of the ancient city, & had brought from Italy a wealth of mosaics, … paintings, & other objets d’art whose theme was more often classically Roman than Italian. He always wore a pair of mosaics in his cuffs for buttons— one a view of the Coliseum (so tiny yet so faithful); the other of the Forum.’31 The downstairs parlour of 454 Angell Street had a lifesize Roman bust on a gilded pedestal. No doubt all this was part of the reason why Lovecraft always preferred the culture of Rome to that of Greece, although other philosophical, aesthetic, and temperamental factors eventually entered into it.
In the short term the effect of reading Hawthorne, Bulfinch, and Garth’s Ovid was that ‘My Bagdad name and affiliations disappeared at once, for the magic of silks and colours faded before that of fragrant templed groves, faun-peopled meadows in the twilight, and the blue, beckoning Mediterranean’ (‘A Confession of Unfaith’). A more important result is that Lovecraft became a writer.
Lovecraft dates the commencement of his writing to the age of six, remarking: ‘My attempts at versification, of which I made the first at the age of six, now took on a crude, internally rhyming ballad metre, and I sang of the exploits of Gods and Heroes.’32 In context this appears to suggest that Lovecraft had begun to write verse prior to his discovery of classical antiquity, but that his fascination with the ancient world impelled him toward renewed poetic composition, this time on classical themes. None of this pre-classical verse survives, and the first poetical work we do have is the ‘second edition’ of ‘The Poem of Ulysses; or, The Odyssey: Written for Young People’. This elaborate little book is dated to 8 November 1897 in the preface, and we have to believe that the ‘first edition’ dated to earlier in the year, prior to Lovecraft’s seventh birthday on 20 August 1897.
On the copyright page Lovecraft writes: ‘Acknowledgements are due to Popes Odyssey and Bulfinch’s Mythology and Harpers Half Hour Series.’ Then, helpfully, ‘Homer first writ the poem.’ I have not been able to ascertain what the book in Harper’s Half Hour Series is; in ‘A Confession of Unfaith’ Lovecraft describes it as a ‘tiny book in the private library of my elder aunt’ (i.e., Lillian D. Phillips). It is rather remarkable to think that Lovecraft had already read the whole of Pope’s Odyssey by the age of seven; but it becomes immediately obvious that in his eighty-eight-line poem he could not possibly have been dependent upon Pope’s fourteen-thousandline translation either metrically or even in terms of the story line. Here is how Lovecraft’s poem begins:
The nighte was darke! O readers, Hark!
And see Ulysses’ fleet!
From trumpets sound back homeward bound He hopes his spouse to greet
This is certainly not Pope; rather, the metre is clearly adapted from Coleridge’s Ancient MarinerAncient Mariner year-old “verse” was pretty bad, and I had recited enough poetry to know that it was so’; what helped him to improve his prosody was a very careful study of Abner Alden’s The Reader (1797), which he declares ‘was so utterly and absolutely the very thing I had been looking for, that I attacked it with almost savage violence’.33 After a month or so, he produced ‘The Poem of Ulysses’.
If nothing else, the work is a remarkable example of concision: in eighty-eight lines Lovecraft has compressed the twelve-thousand lines of Homer’s Odyssey. Lovecraft achieves this compression by deftly omitting relatively inessential portions of the story—in particular, the entire first four books (the Adventures of Telemachos) and, perhaps surprisingly, book eleven (the descent into Hades)— and, more importantly, by retelling the entire story in chronological sequence, from Odysseus’s sailing from Troy to his final return home to Ithaca, rather than in the elaborately convoluted way in which Homer’s Odysseus narrates his adventures.
According to various catalogues of works found at the rear of Lovecraft’s juvenile writings, Lovecraft wrote similar paraphrases of the Iliad and Aeneid, as well as items called ‘Mythology for the Young’ (perhaps a paraphrase of some of Bulfinch) and ‘An Old Egyptian Myth Prepared Specially for Small Children’ (again possibly drawn from Bulfinch, as chapter 34 of The Age of Fable discusses some Egyptian myths, especially that of Isis and Osiris).
Classical antiquity was, however, more than a literary experience for Lovecraft; it was both a personal and even a quasi-religious one. In 1897–99 he pored over the classical relics of the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (the college situated at the foot of College Hill, mostly along Benefit Street), and shortly afterward became familiar with other classical art museums in Providence and Boston. The result was an infatuation with the classical world and then a kind of religious epiphany. Let Lovecraft tell it in his own inimitable way:
When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a halfsincere belief in the old gods and Nature-spirits. I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo, Diana, and Athena, and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk. Once I firmly thought I beheld some of these sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of ‘religious experience’ as true in its way as the subjective ecstasies of any Christian. If a Christian tell me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen the hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaëthusa. (‘A Confession of Unfaith’)
This certainly puts the lie to Bulfinch, who solemnly declared at the very beginning of The Age of Fable: ‘The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. The so-called divinities of Olympus have not a single worshipper among living men.’
In writing the above passage Lovecraft was clearly wishing to show that his scepticism and anticlericalism were of very early origin; but he may be guilty of some exaggeration. Earlier in this essay he reports that ‘I was instructed in the legends of the Bible and of Saint Nicholas at the age of about two, and gave to both a passive acceptance not especially distinguished either for its critical keenness or its enthusiastic comprehension’. He then declares that just before the age of five he was told that Santa Claus does not exist, and that he thereupon countered with the query as to ‘why God is not equally a myth’. ‘Not long afterwards’, he continues, he was placed in a Sunday school at the First Baptist Church, but became so pestiferous an iconoclast that he was allowed to discontinue attendance. Elsewhere, however, he declares that this incident occurred at the age of twelve. When we examine Lovecraft’s philosophical development, the likelihood is that the Sunday school incident indeed took place at the age of twelve, and not at five.