Ecstasies and Odysseys: The Weird Poetry of Donald Wandrei

ISHS 7/03/2009 Blackmore – “Ecstasies & Odysseys: The Weird Poetry of Donald Wandrei”

Ecstasies & Odysseys:

The Weird Poetry of Donald Wandrei

(c) Leigh Blackmore

2007

Donald (Albert) Wandrei’s (1908-87) literary achievements were

numerous. He was an important horror and science fiction writer of the pulp

period, who published in the slicks such as Argosy and Esquire as well as in

the major pulps such as Astounding and Weird Tales. It was he who placed

Lovecraft’s major stories “The Shadow Out of Time” and “At the Mountains

of Madness” with Astounding Stories and it was largely due to his insistence

and efforts that Lovecraft’s correspondence was gathered into five volumes

for publication by Arkham House, the firm he co-founded (with August

Derleth). Although he thus made a contribution integral to the development

of the modern fantasy movement, he declined the Life Achievement Award

conferred on him in 1984 by the World Fantasy Convention.

Wandrei was many things - hunter of wild mushrooms, photographer,

soldier (he was a Batallion Sergeant-Major with the 65th Infantry Division

during the Rhineland and Central Europe Campaigns in WWII), advertising

copywriter, stock market follower, playwright, fictioneer and traveller. In his

signed inscription in a copy of Ecstasy, he described himself thus: "Donald

Wandrei--a bachelor, a babbit, a millionaire, one of God's chosen, or all four, if

he had not taken matters into his own hands and walked into the Garden in

preference to problematical installation into a future gilded vault." He must

also be acknowledged as one of the great weird poets – John Clute to the

contrary (Clute dismisses Wandrei’s poetic oeuvre as “some unremarkable

verse”) (Clute/Nicholls: 1296).

Within the specialised field of weird literature, the practice of writing

weird or supernatural verse is a field yet more specialised, and the

recognition it receives is accordingly diminished. That today, weird poetry is

almost a forgotten genre amongst critics does not obviate the fact that it forms

a noble element of literature across a wide range of time periods and

practitioners.

That there is a long and honourable tradition of weird verse within

Western culture, is testified by August Derleth’s two landmark anthologies of

macabre poetry, Dark of the Moon (Arkham House, 1947) and Fire, Sleet and


Candlelight (Arkham House, 1961). Dark of the Moon charts much of the history

of weird poetry with its selections from Blake, Robert Burns, James Hogg, Sir

Walter Scott, Coleridge, Thomas Moore, Goethe, Keats, Thomas Hood,

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Longfellow, Poe, Tennyson, Bell Scott, LeFanu,

William Allingham, the Rossettis (Dante Gabriel and Christina), James

Thomson, William Morris and many others of the 19th century and earlier; and

presents selections by such modern craftsmen of the genre as Walter de la

Mare, Robert Frost, Vincent Starrett, HP Lovecraft, the deliciously named

Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Clark Ashton Smith, Stephen Vincent Benet, Frank

B. Long, Francis Flagg, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Mary Elizabeth

Counselman, Leah Bodine Drake , Coleman Roseberger and many more. A

large selection of Wandrei’s “Sonnets of the Midnight Hours” also appeared

in this volume. Fire, Sleet and Candelight focuses on poems written between

1947 and 1961, and so represents the modern weird poets: the inevitable CA

Smith, Joseph Payne Brennan, the underappreciated Texan Lilith Lorraine,

Harold Vinal, Raymond Roseliep, Sydney King Russell, Joseph Joel Keith and

many others. If we think of weird verse in modern times we must also think

of writers such as William Scott Home, G. Sutton Breiding, perhaps of Tom

Piccirilli and Jeff Vandermeer, of such Australians as Christopher Brennan,

Kenneth Slessor and Phillip A. Ellis, and even of Thomas Ligotti (with his

Death Poems). Amongst this varied company, Donald Wandrei looms large.

Born in St Paul, Minnesota, on April 20, 1908, son of a socially

prominent attorney, Wandrei was a gifted juvenile talent, writing one of his

greatest stories, “The Red Brain” when he was “a lanky lad of 16” (Schwarz:

10). It was a story that set the tone for most of his best work, which partakes

of a sense of cosmic horror locatable in the work of only a select coterie of

horror writers. Some of the poems in his first collection Ecstasy (such as

“Valerian”) were composed during his first visit with H.P. Lovecraft when

Wandrei was but eighteen, and he told Don Herron that the poems in the

collection were composed from roughly the time he began work on “The Red

Brain” at age 15 until they were published when he was 19. (Herron, “Last

Cosmic Master”: 18). His first two volumes of verse, the bulk of the work on

which his poetic reputation rests, were issued before he was twenty-three

years of age.

It is sobering to realise that Ecstasy (published 1928) appeared in print

three quarters of a century ago, effectively making it a volume from a

different age – one where classical education, taste and intelligence in

literature were more valued than they are today, and when authors prided

themselves on being able to make classical allusions with ease. Wandrei’s

verse exemplifies this old-fashioned elegance.


Wandrei himself wrote of his early tastes in literature and poetry as

focussing on the unearthly and the supernal: “in my own earlier years

dreaming was to me the breath of life and something more than life, the realm

of the mind my abode, and world-making my occupation always…There is a

mighty music in a certain kind of prose; there are poems haunted by a wizard

imagery; and this was the prose and poetry that I sought. I was not studying

prose values, of course, nor did I then know that the greatest prose and poetry

ever written was that completely removed from life in its ordinary physical

forms, that which was timeless; it was instinctively that I rejected the most

powerful literary myths. The authors I read were Poe, and Bierce, and

Machen, Swinburne, Clark Ashton Smith, Park Barnitz, and Baudelaire,

Thomson, Blake, Keats, Saltus, these and all such others that I could find.

Their work was pure literature, prose and poetry in their highest and most

enduring forms. I did not realize it then, but I did realize that their writings

gave me an ineffable pleasure. (“Lotus and Poppy”, in Rahman & Weiler

(eds), Don’t Dream: 355).

It is interesting to compare Wandrei’s youthful precocity when he

began to compose poetry, with the similar precocity of Clark Ashton Smith

and H.P. Lovecraft. Smith began to write fiction around age 11 and poetry at

13, and to publish stories at age 17 and poetry at 19 (when he was hailed as

“the Keats of the Pacific” by San Francisco critics). Lovecraft was the earliest

prodigal, writing juvenile fiction and poetry at the age of seven. Juvenilia

such as “The Beast in the Cave” and “The Alchemist”, stories written by HPL

in his teens, did not appear in print until he was in his late 20’s. He started to

publish his poetry in his teens, but Lovecraft’s verse was poor stuff compared

to the quality of the material that Smith and Wandrei were producing. In this

light we can see that Wandrei is much more on a par with Smith than with

Lovecraft, for his early verse endures even today.

Donald Burleson (in a review of Wandrei’s Collected Poems, 1998) has

written that in the course of his poetic career, “Wandrei’s command of the art

ascended to astonishing heights”. (Burleson: 40). Burleson contends that

Wandrei “clearly deserves to be recognised as an important poet of our time

and an outstanding figure in the American Gothic tradition”.

S.T. Joshi considers that “whatever place he ultimately occupies, his

flawlessly chiselled poetry, old-fashioned as it is by current standards, will

surely continue to live as a vital and central component of his collected

works” and that “among the Lovecraft circle Wandrei had no peer as a poet

save Clark Ashton Smith” (which speaks volumes, for Samuel Loveman, for

one, was no mean poet). (Joshi, “Poetry”: 34). Joshi’s view is that “Wandrei’s

verse is the most consistently meritorious branch of his literary work” and


that “it is entirely possible that [Wandrei] will ultimately be remembered

principally for his poetry) (Joshi, “Poetry”: 9). This seems likely given that

many of his science fiction stories are weakened by the fact that Wandrei had

little scientific background, leading David A Drake to conclude that “the bulk

of Wandrei’s work is flawed, but there is some merit in the worst of it.”

(Drake: 769).

The consistent quality of his poetic output is the more remarkable

given that most of his verse was written in what Joshi has aptly termed “the

white-hot fire of ecstatic youth” (“Poetry”: 34). As D.H. Olson has remarked,

Wandrei’s writing career suffered severe setbacks in the late 1930s due to

“editorial changes in his primary markets and his distraction with non-

remunerative projects like the Lovecraft letters and his attempts at

playwriting.” (The jacket of his novel The Web of Easter Island, Arkham House,

1942, mentions that he is “currently at work on a play”, and this had been

going on since the 1930’s; Olson mentions that he “was also attempting to

forge a new career as a Broadway playwright”). Olson says that: “By the time

he entered the Army in 1942, he had largely stopped writing both fiction and

poetry and, upon his return to civilian life in 1945, his professional efforts

were geared towards comics and Hollywood films, neither of which brought

him any notable success” (Olson, in Joshi/Dziemanowicz: 1173). Ruber

considers that writing for “a strong of comic book publishers” was “a pursuit

far below his intellectual abilities” (Ruber: 68). One would be tempted to

reach the conclusion that Wandrei said all he had to say in the poetic mode by

the time he had reached his mid-twenties – that he had, as it were, burnt

himself out creatively in this sphere – were it not for the fact that late in life he

wrote four new poems which he circulated to friends and colleagues, and

which are among his best work. (They first appeared in Necronomicon Press’

edition of Collected Poems). Joshi calls these poems “as finely polished as those

of his youth” (“Poetry”: 9).

Wandrei took his B.A. at the University of Minnesota, decided against

continuing it as a PhD because there were no academic jobs available during

the Great Depression (Ruber: 66), but later taught English at the university for

two years, before going to become advertising manager of Dutton Publishing

Co at the youthful age of 20. After two years of that he became a public

relations man. During his years at the University of Minnesota Wandrei wrote

(often anonymously or pseudonymously) for virtually all of that school’s

student publications including The Minnesota Daily, for which Wandrei served

as both editor and regular columnist, and the campus humour magazine, Ski-

U-Mah. A number of the poems and short essays were rediscovered and

published in A Donald Wandrei Miscellany. (Most of the originals reside in the

Wandrei papers at the University of Minnesota Historical Society). They


include a plangent memorial to George Sterling, the poetic mentor of Clark

Ashton Smith. The rediscovered poems are minor humorous pieces; but this

little volume includes at least one memorable poetic item in the prose poem

“To One Who Died”, which ends on a note of cosmic wonder and awe:

“And I listened while the mute stars stared from all around, and

turned toward the spaceward flowing windows of night, and into the

measureless and labyrinthine abyss I followed again the unknown trail that

lost itself among the stars, vaguely and vainly seeking solution of cosmic

mysteries.” (A Donald Wandrei Miscellany: 11).

Wandrei suffered (or benefited, depending on how one looks at it)

from dreams and nightmares which haunted his entire adult life. In his story

“The Lady in Grey” he tells of “a man plagued since childhood by

nightmares, for whom the hours from sunset to sunrise…have been

oppressive with fear.” “This was Wandrei’s plight. Throughout his life he

suffered from vivid, fantastic, inexplicable, often terrifying nightmares.”

(Behrends, 23-24). Don Herron points out that many of Wandrei’s eeriest tales

(“The Crater”, “Nightmare”, “A Fragment of a Dream”) were literal

transcriptions of his haunting dreams. (Herron: 449). These nightmares may

have ended in relation to a peculiar epiphany that Donald and Howard

Wandrei experienced in 1956. The Arkham House stocklist for 1973 makes

mention of a work called Circle of Pyramids which consists of correspondence

between Howard and Donald. Whatever revelation came about, the catalogue

description of this book (never issued) says that it “ended forever a siege of

terrifying nightmares”. (This work is extant, and may someday be published).

Wandrei infused the images from his dreams into his poetry as well,

particularly in the cycle or sequence known as “The Sonnets for the Midnight

Hours”. He may be, like H.P. Lovecraft and Jorge Luis Borges, one of the

great literary dreamers of the twentieth century. The imagery presented in the

“Sonnets” is bizarre and fantastic in the extreme, and if Wandrei truly

dreamed all these dreams, his sleep was haunted indeed.

The “Sonnets for the Midnight Hours”, of which there are 26 in the

sequence that Wandrei chose to preserve, were all individually inspired by

dreams of Wandrei’s (see Joshi: Sixty Years: 68). The sonnets were composed

in 1927 and initially appeared in Wandrei’s first volume of verse, Ecstasy and

Other Poems (1928), published by W. Paul Cook’s The Recluse Press on the

advice of H.P. Lovecraft. Twelve of the sonnets were published by Weird Tales

between May 1928 and March 1929 (Mysteries p. 204)

Herron contends that Wandrei’s sonnet series inspired Lovecraft’s own

sonnet sequence “The Fungi from Yuggoth”. Joshi and Schulz don’t mention


this in the entry on the “Fungi” in An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia; however,

Joshi writes elsewhere that “The immediate influence on the Fungi, however,

clearly seems to be Wandrei’s Sonnets of the Midnight Hours, which Lovecraft

read no later than November 1927.” (Joshi, HPL A Life: 463.) HPL himself does

not appear to admit directly to the influence; in a letter of June 30, 1930, he

writes to Wandrei: “Wright has nothing of mine on hand save some verses

called “Fungi from Yuggoth”, which will appear in a series like your “Sonnets

of the Midnight Hours”. (Mysteries, p. 253). This could have been HPL’s

opportunity to acknowledge Wandrei’s influence upon his own cycle. We

should read too much into the fact that he did not take it. It seems clear that

Herron’s and Joshi’s assertions of Wandrei’s influence in this regard are

correct.

“Sonnets for the Midnight Hours” consists of least 28 poems

altogether; Joshi notes that “Wandrei excluded two that had earlier appeared

in Weird Tales, perhaps because he was not satisfied with their quality”.

Joshi’s judgment on Wandrei’s cycle is that it is “very powerful, but does not

seem to me quite as polished or as cumulatively effecting as Lovecraft’s.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft clearly derived the basic idea of a sonnet cycle from

this work, even though his differs considerably from it in actual execution”

(HPL A Life: 463).

There are 36 sonnets in Lovecraft’s sequence. Lovecraft’s sonnets

(written in late 1929), as noted by Joshi & Schultz are mostly “a hybrid form

combining elements of the classic Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet

forms, contrived to provide an element of surprise in the final line”. (Joshi, An

HPL Encyclopedia: 95). Wandrei’s did not keep exclusively to a particular

sonnet form throughout the sequence, and the individual sonnets vary in

their internal rhyme schemes. This could be considered a drawback if one

favours consistency, and as compared with such epic sonnet sequences as

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The House of Life” (100 sonnets all in the same

form), Wandrei’s cycle is both shorter, and more varied; but this factor is

perhaps outweighed by their unity of inspiration (one cannot say unity of

theme, for each has a different subject, from metal gods to torturers to hungry

flowers to disembodied eyes.

Joshi points out that Wandrei’s poems of the “Sonnets” are “unified by

the fact that they are all derived from Wandrei’s dreams and by their

narration in the first person” (A Subtler Magick: The Writing and Philosophy of

H.P. Lovecraft. San Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press, 2nd ed 1986: 234) as contrasted

with “utter randomness of tone, mood and import” in Lovecraft’s “Fungi”.

One could readily envisage writing a critical piece about the sequence on this

basis called “The Continuity of the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours”. This quality


of thematic unification strengthens Wandrei’s claim to be the foremost

versifier of weird sonnet cycles; he was the first both to conceive of such a

cycle, and to actually execute such a conceptually unified cycle. Certainly, on

this basis, Wandrei’s “Sonnets” are undeservedly overlooked compared to

Lovecraft’s more famous “Fungi” sequence.

As pointed out by Joshi/Schultz, “the central image of “Fantastic

Sculpture”, one of his Sonnets of the Midnight Hours – a figure whose head is a

tuft of slender tentacles” – resembles the coachman of HPL’s dream”

(Mysteries of Time and Spirit: 190). This was HPL’s famous dream of the

motorman with the cone-like face, related to Wandrei in HPL’s letter of 24

Nov 1927 [SL II: 306].

In a letter of Dec 19, 1927, Lovecraft advised Wandrei “Your technique

is improving rapidly – more & more of mature swing & phrasing appears – so

that I would now hesitate to advise you as exclusively towards prose fantasy

as I did a year ago. Develop the two streams side by side as Poe did – for you

certainly, if I am not too old to have an opinion of my own, possess genius of

the most authentic sort in both lines”. (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: 192.) In a

letter of Sept 1928 Lovecraft confessed himself “very anxious to have a

complete collection of your weird poetry in book form” (Mysteries of Time and

Spirit: 228). Lovecraft did ultimately own copies of both Wandrei’s early

volumes of verse, Ecstasy and Dark Odyssey (Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library: 141-42.),

both presented to him by Wandrei.

By Jan 14, 1928, Wandrei had sent Cook the final proofs for his first

collection of poetry. At that time he planned to issue a second volume of

poems to be called The Midnight Hours which would have included the sonnet

cycle. However, this proposed volume did not appear. His second collection

of poems, Dark Odyssey (1931), did not contain any of his “Sonnets of the

Midnight Hours”, which ultimately were collected in Poems for Midnight

(1964). (Mysteries of Time and Spirit: 198-99).

We must acknowledge Wandrei’s cycle as the forerunner of such weird

sonnet cycles. It must be regarded, then, as not only inherently valuable as

pioneering a new sub-genre within weird verse; but especially significant for

its influence upon Lovecraft. “The Fungi from Yuggoth” is probably the

greatest cycle of poems in weird verse; and in penning “Sonnets from the

Midnight Hours”, Wandrei in effect provided the antecedent for the form.

Only one or two others have attempted it. Lin Carter, in his Dreams from

R’lyeh (Arkham House, 1975), achieved a weird sonnet cycle of 31 poems.

Richard L. Tierney’s Collected Poems (Arkham House, 1981) contains 48 weird


sonnets, but Tierney did not designate any such numbered sequence as

Wandrei, Lovecraft and Carter.

C.A. Smith, Lovecraft and R. E. Howard have often been referred to as

“The Three Musketeers” of Weird Tales due to their prolific output and their

common membership of the Lovecraft Circle. But there is another triumvirate,

formed of Lovecraft, Smith and Wandrei – a triumvirate of writers who

shared what can be termed ‘the cosmic attitude’. Wandrei’s philosophic and

aesthetic attitudes were closely similar to those held by Smith and Lovecraft,

and this makes them, in effect the “Three Cosmic Weirdists” of Weird Tales.

(William Hope Hodgson is another writer of the weird much of whose, for

example his novels The Nightland and The House on the Borderland demonstrate

the cosmic attitude). In a letter from H.P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith of

21 Jan, 1927, Lovecraft wrote: “you no doubt have my postal commenting on

Wandrei's work. I was really immensely taken with it, & believe that he has a

more truly cosmic & fantastic vision than anyone else I know with the solitary

exception of yourself. There is a quality of genuine bizarrerie in his

perspective…I noticed the tense & convincing atmosphere of nightmare in

'the Door of the Room' That piece more than any other made me think of your

landscapes. 'The Messengers' is indeed very much like your 'Envoys' &

illustrates the essential parallelism of the fantastic imagination in different

individuals- a circumstance strongly arguing the existence of a natural mental

world of the weird with a common background & fixed laws, out of which

spring a literature as authentic in its way as the realistic literature which

springs form mundane experience”. (Lovecraft, SL II: 98-99).

Wandrei was an early appreciator of the work C.A. Smith and wrote an

ardent appreciation of it, “The Emperor of Dreams,” which appeared in

Overland Monthly 84, No 12 (Dec 1926), (reprinted in 1988 in the journal

Klarkash-Ton). This essay was an ecstatic paean of praise to Smith’s work, but

it is also highly revealing of Wandrei’s own attitudes to fantastic poetry. “A

poet cannot live on visions, on dreams, on a prospect of future fame. He must

live on something more material. And one cannot write when it is necessary

to earn a sustenance”. “There is no place in contemporary prose and poetry

for genius”. These could be aphorisms representing Wandrei’s general point

of view, and feelings about his own poetic endeavours, not just about Smith.

Wandrei continues his expressions of approbation of Smith: “Some

writers have skill and ability but desire wealth or immediate fame; their work

has not so great a popularity but endures longer. A very few have what is

called “genius”. They write primarily for themselves, or with a certain small

group of people who know literature in mind. They are artists, word artists;

and they fashion their prose or poetry with care and labor. They are seldom


appreciated in their lifetime, and never have widespread popularity, but the

highest minds of every age enjoy their work. These are ones who speak to us

across the ages, who will speak across the ages to come”. If it be so, then

Wandrei himself may be placed in this category. His verse is carefully

fashioned, form being one of his chief considerations in addition to a

concentration on the outré and the bizarre. Wandrei continues, of Smith’s

poems: “They would have been accomplishments for a man of maturity, for

one who had long written poetry, as the work of a youth they are remarkable

achievements…it was a world-weary youth wise beyond his years who wrote

these poems beautiful, fantastic, sometimes bitter and more than once

inexpressibly terrible in their suggestion.” We cannot fail to see how Wandrei

himself was “a world-weary youth wise beyond his years” – this is certainly

borne out by a reading of his letters to Lovecraft (Mysteries of Time and Spirit).

Who but a fellow poetic soul could have written thusly of Smith: “Here

and there may be found a poppy-flower, an orchid from the hot-bed of Hell,

the whisper of an eldritch wind, a breath from the burnings sands of regions

infernal. The wizard calls, and at his imperious summons come genie, witch,

and daemon to open the portal to the haunted realms of faery; and their

wonder is transmuted so that those who can open the door my listen to the

murmuring waters of Acheron, or watch the passing of a phantom throng;

and the fen-fires gleam; and the slow mists arise; and heavy perfumes, and

poisons, and dank odors fill the air. A marble palace rises in the dusk, a

treasure-house of gold, and ebony, and ivory; soft lutes play within; fair

women, passionless and passionate, wander in the corridors; silks and

tapestries adorn the walls, and fuming censers burn a rare incense” And on

goes the ‘review’, praising Smith in terms which (if lavish) are nonetheless

found to be no exaggeration by connoisseurs of the weird who appreciate

Smith’s exotic and ultramundane worlds.

The influence of both Smith and of his poetic mentor, George Sterling,

are evident in Ecstasy and Other Poems. Yet Wandrei retained a voice all of his

own. Wandrei made explicit his debt to Sterling with the exquisite “In

Memoriam: George Sterling”, a poem written after Sterling’s suicide (Nov

1926):

“He walks where none can know or see,

Alone and far,

A lonely traveller on another star,

A dreamer in eternity,

Whose dream of old is gone

Before the greater dream whose dawn/is night”.


The poem “Valerian” is dedicated to Clark Ashton Smith, and its

imagery is perhaps the most Smith-esque of any of Wandrei’s poems:

“Thy purple eyes, Valerian,

Have known the fungi of the moon,

Have travelled lands Hesperian,

Have seen the blood-red plenilune.”

One can’t help wondering whether Lovecraft was struck by the phrase

“fungi of the moon” and whether it may have partially inspired the actual

title of his “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence. The cosmic view of Sterling and

of Smith, with their visions of the oblivion of worlds, is represented here:

“They gazed on stars that now are dust,

They gorged on wonders vanished, dead

They saw Mercurial cities rust

Beneath twin moons of livid red.”

In the second-last stanza of the poem Wandrei writes:

“Valerian! Thine eyes are old

beyond the age of any sun;

Their secrets will remain untold

until the last oblivion.”

“The Last Oblivion” was, of course, a sonnet of Smith’s from his 1925

collection Sandalwood, (a volume which Wandrei assisted Smith to finance) so

this is a nice homage from Wandrei.

Wandrei’s known poetic output numbers somewhat less than 150

poems. 141 were collected in Necronomicon Press’ Collected Poems (1998). This

is admittedly a somewhat slender quantity of poems on which to base a

reputation. Clark Ashton Smith wrote many more poems – there are some 500

lyrics gathered in his Selected Poems alone – yet perhaps what matters is

quality and not quantity; and as the output of a few youthful years, this

oeuvre of Wandrei’s is by no means shabby. Wandrei painstakingly revised

many of his poems in later years , re-publishing stronger versions of them in

Poems For Midnight, and if one examines individual poems and their revisions,

one can see how Wandrei’s care for his craft extended to subtle nuances

which might have escaped lesser poets.

Wandrei’s poem “The Unknown Color” (one of the Sonnets) may have

anticipated Lovecraft’s story ‘the Colour Out of Space”, with its theme of a

prismatic sentience of unknown origin:


“Whence came that unknown color? was its source

Beyond the violet, within the red?

Impalpable, a brain-shaped thing of dread,

A glowing form, it drifted on a course

Malefic, purposive, with alien force…”.

Other critics on the sources of this Lovecraft tale, attribute other

influences - Will Murray, for instance, sees Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned

as a major influence, and Robert M. Price has found a Biblical antecedent (see

References). Lovecraft’s story was written in March 1927, and appeared in the

Sept 1927 Amazing Stories. It is possible that both writers independently

conceived the idea of an alien colour, but if HPL saw the manuscript of

Wandrei’s poems early enough that poem may well have influenced his tale.

Indeed, we know that he saw the proofs of Wandrei’s first book as early as

November 1927, for he wrote of them to Frank Belknap Long: “ “I never want

to do a bit of proof-reading again – although I shall, as a matter of fact, read

Wandrei’s page proofs, which Cook will soon have ready. This reminds me to

exclaim anent the excellence of Wandrei’s recent poetry. The child is certainly

making astonishing strides – as the Sonnets of the Midnight Hours shew in

particular” (Lovecraft, SL II: 186). It would be a tribute to Wandrei indeed, if

his poem could be said to have inspired (even partially) the tale of Lovecraft’s

which he regarded as his favourite, and which marked the beginning of

Lovecraft’s welding of horror with science fiction that distinguishes most of

his later work. There is another curious similarity between Lovecraft’s tale

and one of Wandrei’s. Wandrei’s story “The Crystal Bullet” (Weird Tales,

March 1941) tells of a glowing projectile with strange qualities which

descends from space and lands on a farmer’s property, a scenario which

rather recalls the glowing alien lifeform in the form of a meteorite which

descends on Nahum Gardner’s place in the Lovecraft tale. But since

Wandrei’s tale written eighteen years after Lovecraft’s, the theme may simply

be a faint echo of Lovecraft’s, with a different outcome.

Colour often features as a theme in Wandrei’s work. From the story “The Red

Brain” to the sonnet “Nightmare in Green”, to “The Five Lords” with its five

colours of doom, Wandrei found colour a potent theme. In the poem “Red”,

the poet’s fascination with the single phenomenon of redness verges on the

monomaniacal fixation of the narrator in Poe’s “Berenice”.

Pagan images abound in Wandrei’s verse. Two poems deal with

Bacchus, the Greek god of wine and freedom also known as Dionysus: “After

Bacchus, Eros” and “Bacchanalia”. The first is brief yet poignant:


“For song and laughter, now the wind’s regret;

For youth, a ravished poppy’s petals blown”

“Bacchanalia” is a song of pagan passion as wild and yearning as

anything out of Swinburne, Aleister Crowley, or Kenneth Slessor:

“Who cared? Once more immortal Pan was playing

His pagan pipes for semigod and maid;

And body to body, drunken forms were swaying

In the glade.”

“At the Bacchic Revel” is brief yet lusty:

“A drunken girl where the revellers whirl –

Flesh and the grape and a wreath of vine!

A girdle that slips from a maiden’s hips—

Lust, and the red, red wine!”

“A Drinking Song” is another tribute to the virtues of the grape:

“For the grape’s red juice there is just one use –

Song and the Devil and Wine are good!”

Other pagan poems include “The Morning of a Nymph”, “Witches’’

Sabbath” and the prose poem “Paphos”. The latter demonstrates that

Wandrei was as capable of Lovecraft and C. A. Smith at writing in this

rarefied form, which occupies the space between fiction and poetry. As well

as the imagery of Pan, of naked maidens, of nymphs and centaurs, of wine

and deathless Greece that occur in this poem, there is effective alliteration,

and a drowsy, dreamy cadence that conjures an atmosphere of amorousness

and beauty:

“The roses scented the warm night air, the violets grew in bower and

glade, the fabulous poppies of Paphos budded and bloomed; the maidens

wove garlands of the flowers and put wreaths on their brows; the maidens

wove violets in their hair and strewed petals to the winds and the night and

the great gods Pan, Dionysus, and Aphrodite”.

While there is no reason to suspect that Wandrei was familiar with

them, there are echoes here of the cadences one finds in the great cycle of the

Hymns of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess also known as Ishtar. One feels that

Wandrei had immersed himself in the knowledge of ancient cultures, and that

(like C.A. Smith particularly), he was drawn to write paeans (over-


romanticised, perhaps) to those more innocent, and yet more sexually

liberated times of ages past.

Some of his fiction could also be seen in terms of extended prose

poems. Steve Behrends, for one, has referred to the stories “The Red Brain”,

“The Messengers” and “The Woman at the Window” as prose poems rather

than fiction (Behrends, 22-23).

The narrator of “Somewhere Past Ispahan” is, like des Esseintes, the

anti-hero of Huysman’s Against the Grain, inured to the luxuries that his rich

and decadent lifestyle provides him. Ispahan or Esfahan is an ancient city of

central Iran; at its zenith, under the Safavid dynasty in the 17th cent., Esfahan

had a population of c.600, 000, making it one of the world’s great cities of the

time. The poet is sunk in ennui – indeed, he is even sick of ennui itself:

“Now I am bored with all things brief and transitory,

With love, and life, and death, and even with ennui;

Now no things interest me,

And I am sick alike of passion and of glory,

Of days and nights that are an old and tiring story,

And dreams that can not be.”

Strangely, although it seems Wandrei never married, (the jacket of his

1965 story collection Strange Harvest describes him as a bachelor, by which is

probably meant “a confirmed bachelor”), his descriptions of women in poems

such as this are at least as lush, if as over-romanticised, as those found in

those of the womanising C.A. Smith:

“And if you charm me not, and I grow weary of

The kohl that shades your eyes, your breasts with henna tipped,

And your mouth poppy-lipped,

And if your kisses, like most kisses, mean not love,

Rubies I yet will place in that jet hair above

Your body slender-hipped”.

The world-weary narrator of this Islamic world of houris and dream

caravans, of incenses and stuporous drugs, desires only:

“to leave behind me all the weary works of man

And take the caravan

To heart’s desire that only I and Allah know,

The outer-lands where all’s a dream, and dream-winds blow

Somewhere past Ispahan”.


Wandrei’s relations with women are something of a mystery. In a 1934

interview with Fantasy magazine, when Wandrei was aged 26, he declared

that he was not married, and “emphatically asserts that he never will be!”

(Schwarz: 10). Rickard relates an incident in which Wandrei was repelled by

the spectacle of fellow sf and fantasy writers thumbing through adult

magazines at a meeting at Forrest J. Ackerman’s house in Los Angeles

(Rickard, 5). Yet much of his poetry has an erotic tinge, and we know from

Dennis Rickard that Wandrei “once alluded to being in an intense

relationship when he lived in New York, but of it he only said, “I will never

talk about it.”” (Rickard, SIWF 3: 6). Perhaps his experience of women was

slim; nevertheless Wandrei was still more than capable of penning some

sensitive and sensual lyrics, such as “My Lady Hath Two Lovely Lips” :

“I’d be missing

Joys that pass and youth too fleet,

Springtide waning, Beauty sweet,

If I thus forgot to meet

Duty, in her lips caressing!”

and “To Lucasta, On Her Birthday”:

“Her step is lighter than the summer breezes

That stir the wakened rose;

She walks in charm, adoring nature pleases

to worship where she goes.”

S.T. Joshi has aptly pointed out that the central them of Wandrei’s

poetry is that “beauty must die” (a line from “Let Us Love Tonight”.) It was

Poe who, contending that the most powerful emotions to be triggered by

poetry (and art in general) are the joy experienced in perceiving something

beautiful and the sorrow connected with the thought of death, suggested that

the most poetic of all possible subjects was the death of a beautiful woman.

The influence of Keats on Wandrei has often been remarked, and the

Romantic source of this sentiment, may be clearly seen in Keats’ “Ode to

Melancholy”, which concludes:

“Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure night,


Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung”.”

Of course, in the light of more modern sensibilities, such sentiments can be

seen as objectifying women, with the poet projecting shallow appreciation of

her – that is, that beauty if the physical symmetry of form and not of inner

spirit & character which increases with age and experience. While recognising

Wandrei as the inheritor of an approach which originated with Poe and the

other Romantics, we ought also to recognise that the emotions expressed in

such verse are one-dimensional, implying that the poet wants the woman for

pleasure without real relating or responsibility.

The theme of Death, especially death in or underlying life, permeates

Wandrei’s poetry. In poems like “Chant to the dead”, “The Corpse Speaks”,

“The Dead Mistress”, “Death and the Poet: A Fragment”, “In Memoriam: No

Name”, “Let Us Love Tonight”, “Death and the Traveller: A Fragment”, “The

Voice of Beauty” and “The Worm King” (the latter to some extent reminiscent

of both Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm” and such tales of C.A. Smith’s as “The

Kingdom of the Worm” and “The Coming of the White Worm”) Death and its

‘illimitable dominion over all” (to quote Poe) is the inescapable, omnipresent

force in Life. In this he was influenced by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose

Death’s Jest Book he acclaimed as “my favourite” (Mysteries of Time and Spirit:

102) and by Park Barnitz, the author of The Book of Jade (see Joshi, “Poetry of

DW: 13, Note 3).

One of the poems from Barnitz’ book had appeared in The Overland

Monthly where Wandrei had published his appreciation of Clark Ashton

Smith, and Wandrei may have seen this. Certainly he sought out The Book of

Jade at the John Hay library when he visited Lovecraft in 1932. But he had

access to the volume long before this, for he lent it to Clark Ashton Smith in

1925, as we know from Smith’s comments in his letter to Wandrei of July 10

that year: “Dear Mr. Wandrei, I am greatly indebted to you for the loan of the

Book of Jade, which I will return to you in a week or two. You are right about

the mortuary poems being the best: some of them, such as the 'Sonnet of the

Instruments of Death,' 'Sepulchral Life' etc. are truly impressive, and, it seems

to me, very original. There is a tremendous idea in the 'Grotesques,' also, in

the second of the 'Fragments.' In the first section, the sonnet 'Ennui' impressed

me as being perhaps the best, or at last, the most perfect. Ennui and sheer


corruption are both extremely difficult subjects to handle. If I am ever in a

position to edit an anthology, I will certainly include at least half-a-dozen of

these poems.

(…).

It is scarcely possible to write a piece on Donald Wandrei without at

least touching on the work of his younger brother Howard Wandrei, a

brilliant macabre artist. (The ‘fantastic’ Wandreis also had an older brother,

David, and a sister, Jeanette, who did not venture into the domain of the

macabre). If Donald Wandrei is still unjustly neglected today, at least he is not

as overlooked as his brother Howard, despite the recent appearance of three

volumes of Howard’s stories from Fedogan and Bremer. Like Donald, he was

multi-talented. According to Clute and Grant, Howard Wandrei is estimated

to have “produced nearly 200 stories” (Clute/Grant: 995). Most of Howard’s

exquisitely detailed linework has never appeared in print, (although Donald’s

Collected Poems, 1998, reproduced about eight pieces in black and white that

had earlier appeared in Dark Odyssey and Poems for Midnight, and some thirty

pieces appear in The Eerie Mr Murphy, Fedogan and Bremer, 2003. The three

F&G jackets give a hint of the gorgeous and luxuriant riot of colour that must

be a feature of his work in general; and the new volume Sanctity and Sin

includes numerous illustrations by Howard to accompany Donald’s poems).

The main obstacles to the publication of the bulk of Howard’s artwork

include access to the extant originals, and the enormous potential expense

involved in photographing and reproducing the work.

Howard Wandrei appears to have had some visionary or esoteric

insights in the course of his studies of William Blake. His late art features

“Radial Symbolism”, a style which apparently helped him map out his story

plots but is also extremely suggestive in its use of motifs from Blake. Judging

by his later art, Howard may have undergone some sort of visionary

experience similar to that of Philip K. Dick, who had extensive Gnostic

visions. Yet the nature of these esoteric insights will remain a puzzle until the

works referred to in that 1973 Arkham House stocklist – Radial Symbolism and

Catalogue Index, and the mysterious Circle of Pyramids correspondence, can be

published.

Astoundingly, Howard Wandrei doesn’t even rate an entry in Robert

Weinberg’s extensive volume on science fiction and fantasy artists (see

References). Until a volume collecting all of Howard Wandrei’s art appears,

his true legacy will not be discernible. Donald’s poem “September Hill”,

though, is a touching tribute to his brother:

“Here on the hillside by the great gnarled boughs

Of oak the leaves fall in autumnal haze


While over us the wind at twilight soughs,

And past the winding river’s end you gaze,…” (A Donald Wandrei

Miscellany: 30).

A portion of Donald’s fiction and his poetry was directly inspired by

Howard’s art, which has been called “The best miniature work since the

Middle Ages”. “The Woman at the Window” was one such tale. The

compelling weirdness of the poetry may owe much to the like weirdness of

his brother’s art. Nevertheless, Donald’s knowledge of literary technique, the

breadth of his erudition and his instinctive feel for the appropriate forms for

his outré subject matter are the factors which (despite whatever inspiration he

drew from Howard’s work) enabled him to encapsulate his horrific vision in

literature.

Whether Wandrei’s first two volumes of verse garnered any reviews is

not clear. As is often the case with poetry collections, only an extremely small

number of the obligatory slim volumes was printed. Ecstasy had only

(according to some sources) 332 copies. Jack Chalker and Mark Owings in The

Science-Fantasy Publishers say of it “350 copies printed, but evidence suggests

no more than 250 were bound." Dark Odyssey had only 400 copies; and even

Poems for Midnight had only 700 copies according to its colophon, although

Derleth, Jaffery, Joshi (Sixty Years) and Nielsen all give a figure of 742 copies

as the true number. (No contemporary reviews of the latter volume are

known). This makes for a grand total of well under 1500 copies of Wandrei’s

three major collections of verse. Wandrei also published two stories and eight

poems in an anthology called Broken Mirrors (Minneapolis: Avon Press, 1928)

but as the edition only ran to 82 copies, that publication scarcely served to

increase Wandrei’s poetic fame. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the

critical reception of this aspect of his work has been muted until recently.

In his later years (on his return to Minnesota after WWII), Wandrei’s

life was apparently a mix of uneventfulness and difficulty. Lovecraft had died

in 1937. Donald’s brother Howard died in 1956, his mother sometime later,

and his sister in 1972. His mother and sister had long been confined to

nursing homes and Wandrei had often visited them while they were live.

Clark Ashton Smith died in 1961. Wandrei seems to have missed his family,

and his old literary companions. Marc Michaud declares that “there simply

were not any more like them who could offer to him the intellectual and

artistic stimulation he needed”. (Michaud: 21). In these later years, in which

he became withdrawn, many thought him a shadowy character, and some

believed him dead. A tall, gaunt figure, he lived alone in his home, virtually

the last of his literary species. Klein says he was “reclusive, eccentric and

notoriously difficult” (Klein: 35). He seems to have been a gloomy personality


in later life: “He seldom looked at the person he was speaking to and barely

raised his voice above a whisper.” (Ruber, 65).

Yet although he was increasingly involved with literary feuds, and a

protracted bitter lawsuit against Arkham House, (for details see the

Afterword to Don’t Dream), and that he kept a list of literary enemies which

included former pulp writer cronies like Carl Jacobi, Wandrei could still be

genial and garrulous with visitors to his home such as literary agent Kirby

McCauley and T.E.D. Klein. His friendship with August Derleth last for forty-

four years, and taught Derleth to hunt for the elusive morel mushroom – a

practice they continued for many years together as an annual ritual. Some go

so far as to say that Wandrei entertained “a never-ending stream of visitors

and house-guests” (Ruber: 67).

In 1982 Wandrei underwent a serious beating at the hands of a burglar

who broke into his house. He suffered the indignity and pain of having his

hands broken by the intruder (Behrends: 23) and also a fractured pelvis

(Rickard: 21). He underwent a long convalescence and needed to walk

thereafter with the aid of a cane. He talked of issuing a three-volume

autobiography, but this may never have been begun (Rickard: 7).

A dozen or so prose poems appear in the posthumous collection Don’t

Dream. Space prohibits us from discussing these here, but enthusiast of

Wandrei’s poetry need to possess this volume for these poems, as well as for

the many fantastic stories collected therein. Suffice it to say that in works like

“Black Flame”, “The Shrieking House”, “The Phantom City”, “The Kingdom

of Dreams and “Dreaming Away My Life”, there are memorably touches of

the bizarre and the outré.

S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have written of CA Smith’s poetry that

“the likelihood that Smith will ever attain widespread recognition for his

poetry is, to be sure, not great. Most members of the literary community have

become so unaccustomed to the lushness and complexity of this kind of

poetry that they are likely to pass it off unthinkingly as either esoteric or

passé” (Joshi & Schultz, The Last Oblivion: 11). The same can be said of

Wandrei. But if we find in Smith compressed brilliance, imaginative range,

and verbal and metrical panache, the same can very much be said of Wandrei.

Wandrei himself, writing of Lovecraft correspondent J. Vernon Shea, said “No

one can predict judgments of the future, either the accolades or the oblivion of

time”. (Afterword, Shea, In Search of Lovecraft). The obscurity into which his

work fell for many years began to be mitigated in the late 1980’s with the

republication of most of his best stories in three volumes from Fedogan and


Bremer, and with the publication of the letters between him and Lovecraft in

2002 by Night Shade Books.

Can Wandrei be said to be the equal of such masters of cosmic verse as

Clark Ashton Smith and George Sterling? Brian Stableford considers that

“Wandrei never quite succeeded, in his poetry or his prose, in his attempt to

cultivate an ornamented style comparable to the one that was the hallmark of

his first idol, Clark Ashton Smith” (Stableford: 621). Certainly his vocabulary

was not as exotic as Smith’s (could anyone’s be?). And Wandrei never

produced a single work that could rival in epic majesty such imperishable

classics as Smith’s “The Hashish Eater”, or Sterling’s “Wine of Wizardry” or

“The Testimony of the Suns”; although ‘Somewhere Past Ispahan”, his

longest poem, may also be his crowning poetic achievement. On the other

hand, such long poems as “Ecstasy”, “Sanctity and Sin” and ‘Dark Odyssey”

are brilliant exemplars of their type. If Wandrei cannot be said to be in the

very first rank of weird poets, he produced in a few short years a consistent

body of work united by its focus on themes of the macabre, the weird and the

elegiac. The variety of his forms, the pureness of the weird element in many

of the poems, the cosmic outlook and sweeping scale of at least some of them,

the ofttimes mordant and sardonic tone and the poignant mixture of beauty

and death which feature in his work, and the focus on themes of intrusion

from the unknown, must combine to make us acclaim Donald Wandrei as not

simply a unique talent, but as one of the most distinguished poets in the

weird field.

References [Barnitz, Park]. http://www.bookofjade.com/

Barnitz, Park. The Book of Jade. London: Durtro Press: 1998. Expanded

reprint of the scarce 1901 edition of decadent poetry, includes a ten-page

introduction by Mark Valentine, and a four-page afterword by Thomas

Ligotti titled ''Thoughts Concerning A Decadent Universe''. (300 numbered

copies printed.)

Behrends, Steve. “Something from Above: The Imaginative Fiction of Donald

Wandrei”. Studies in Weird Fiction 3 (Fall 1988).

Burleson, Donald. Review of The Collected Poems of Donald Wandrei. Studies in

Weird Fiction, 3, (Fall 1988).

Chalker, Jack and Mark Owings. The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A

Bibliographic History, 1923-2001. Westminster, MD: Mirage Press, 1991.

Clute, John and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. UK: Orbit/Little

Brown, 1997.

--- and Peter Nicholls (ed). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. UK: Orbit/Little

Brown, 1993.


Derleth, August. Thirty Years of Arkham House 1939-1969: A History and

Bibliography. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1970.

Drake, David A. “Donald Wandrei” in Curtis C. Smith (ed). Twentieth Century

Science Fiction Writers, 2nd ed. London/Chicago: St James Press, 1986.

Herron, Don. “Donald Wandrei” in Jack Sullivan (ed).The Penguin

Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural .NY: Viking/Penguin, 1986.

---“The Last Cosmic Master”. Studies in Weird Fiction 4 (Fall 1988)

Hughesdon, Helen Mary. “Introduction” (Rahman and Weiler, eds, Don’t

Dream).

Jaffery, Sheldon. The Arkham House Companion: 50 Years of Arkham House.

Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1989.

Joshi, S.T. “The Poetry of Donald Wandrei”. Studies in Weird Fiction, 3, (Fall

1988).

--- Sixty Years of Arkham House. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1999.

--- H.P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1996.

---Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue, 2nd ed. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002.

--- and David E. Schultz. The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton

Smith. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2002.

---and David E. Schultz (eds). Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H.P.

Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2002).

Klein, T.E.D. “A Haunted House”. Studies in Weird Fiction 3 (Fall 1988)

Lovecraft, H.P. Selected Letters II (1925-1929). Sauk City, WI: Arkham House,

1968.

Michaud, Marc A. “Donald Wandrei: An Appreciation”. Studies in Weird

Fiction 3 (Fall 1988).

Murray, Will. “Sources for “The Colour Out of Space”. Crypt of Cthulhu 4, No

3 (WN 28), (Yuletide 1984).

Nielsen, Leon. Arkham House Books: A Collectors’ Guide. Jefferson, NC:

McFarland, 2004.

Olson. D.H. “Donald Wandrei” in Joshi, S.T. and Stefan Dziemanowicz (eds).

Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood

Press, 2005 (3 vols).

--- “Of Donald Wandrei, August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft” (in Rahman and

Weiler, eds, Don’t Dream).

Price, Robert M. “A Biblical Antecedent for “The Colour Out of Space”.

Lovecraft Studies 25 (Fall 1991)

Don't Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy Fiction of Donald Wandrei.

Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer,1997.

Rickard, Dennis. “A Wanderer in Cosmic Voids”. Studies in Weird Fiction 3

(Fall 1988).

Ruber, Peter. “Donald Wandrei 1980-1987” in Peter Ruber (ed). Arkham’s

Masters of Horror. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. 2000.


Schultz, David E. and Scott Connors (eds). Selected Letters of Clark Ashton

Smith. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 2003.

Schwarz, Julius and Mortimer Weisinger. “Donald Wandrei” (interview).

Fantasy magazine (May 1934).

Stableford, Brian. “Donald Wandrei” in David Pringle (ed) St James Guide to

Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1998.

Tierney, Richard L. “Introduction”, Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of

Donald Wandrei. Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer, 1999 (2nd expanded

edition).

Wandrei, Donald. “Afterword”. J. Vernon Shea. In Search of Lovecraft. West

Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press, 1991.

--- Collected Poems. Edited by S.T. Joshi. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon

Press, 1988.

--- Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei. Minneapolis, MN:

Fedogan & Bremer, 1999 (2nd expanded edition).

--- Dark Odyssey. St Paul, MN: Webb Publishing Co, 1931.

--- A Donald Wandrei Miscellany. Edited by D.H. Olson. Minneapolis, MN:

Sidecar Preservation Society, 1991; 2nd edition Dec 2001 (100 numbered

copies).

---Don’t Dream: The Collected Horror and Fantasy Fiction of Donald Wandrei.

Edited by Phillip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler.

Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan & Bremer, 1997.

--- Ecstasy and Other Poems. [Athol, Mass]: The Recluse Press (W. Paul Cook),

1928.

--- “The Emperor of Dreams”. Klarkash-Ton: The Journal of Smith Studies 1 (June

1988).

--- Poems for Midnight. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1964.

--- Sanctity and Sin: The Collected Poems and Prose Poems of Donald Wandrei.

Edited by S.T. Joshi. NY: Hippocampus Press, 2007 (forthcoming).

Weinberg, Robert. A Biographical Dictionary of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Artists. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to S.T. Joshi for permitting me to examine

the text of Sanctity and Sin prior to publication, and to Steve Behrends for

providing a copy of the Schwarz and Weisinger Fantasy magazine interview

with Wandrei. Many thanks to Dwayne H. Olson for answering my questions

and advising me on the complicated pre-publication history of Circle of

Pyramids. Many thanks also to Danny and Margaret Lovecraft, and to my

partner Margi Curtis, for proofreading and editorial work on this piece.

Ecstasies and Odysseys: The Weird Poetry of Donald Wandrei

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