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Ebony and Crystal
'Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams''
Clark Ashton Smith's Birth and Early Recognition
Clark Ashton Smith was born on January 13th 1893 in Long Valley, California.
Smith achieved local recognition early in his life for his poems in the vein of Swinburne. He is grouped with the West Coast Romantics along with Joaquin Miller, Sterling, and Nora May French and was often cited as ‘The Last of the Great Romantics’ and ‘The Bard of Auburn’.
His Literary Reputation and Style
As a writer Smith is commonly thought of as one of the ‘big three of Weird Tales’ alongside Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft. His long and literary friendship with Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft’s passing in 1937. Smith’s beautifully rich, full and ornate vocabulary along with its cosmic perspective and rough humour were all evidence that, as it was put, "nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse."
His Own Words on Writing
Smith said of his writing style that: "My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation."
His Death
Clark Ashton Smith, at the age of 68, died on 14th August 1961 in Pacific Grove, California.
