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Post by cromagnonman on May 18, 2020 15:13:49 GMT
I have often read that CAS poetry is so marvelous. But I have to confess that poetry in genre does nothing for me. I guess this is mainly the language barrier, but I am completly tone-deaf to it. I have read some poetry by Howard and Lovecraft, but I couldn't take it seriously. If I stumble upon something written in verse in a collection or anthology, I ignore it. In this I am too narrow minded, I know, but I have a hard time with the idea that poetry about imaginary worlds has any relevance at all.
I agree to some extent. For me poetry has the function of bringing me closer to some profound principle, or connecting together corresponding relations in Life and Nature, to clarify and comfortably bring home something I have vaguely appreciated, so I can appreciate it even more. I like some of William Wordsworth's inspired poems, because they are straightforward and relate to Nature. Yes, that's how I generally feel about poetry too, though I was a bit more open to it when I was younger. For Nature poetry, I'd go to Dylan Thomas, though. Like Andy, I can't really take CAS or HPL seriously as poets; it just seems so contrived, as if they were playing at being over-opiated Romantic poets or Victorian decadents. Anyone know... Did Weird Tales pay the same for poems and stories (e.g. the same number of cents per word, or whatever)? For a magazine with such a stingy penny-pinching reputation Weird Tales doesn't appear to have done its resident poets too badly. In a letter of June 1928 Robert E Howard quotes a rate of 25 cents a line for verse, a fact borne out by the $4 he recorded getting paid for "The Gates of Nineveh", a poem of sixteen lines. Compare that to the $80 he got for "Red Shadows", a novelette of some 13,500 words. Now applied mathematics is not my forte by a long chalk but you're looking at a disparity here of something like 4 cents a word against one sixteenth of a cent.
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