I, like thyself, was--and perhaps still am--part of the unpopular 'anti-Dunsany' camp. But some of the folks here have caused me to do some thinking...I now must concede the importance and benefit of his overall influence on HPL in the big picture--even if I don't care for some of the byproducts that emerged along the way--which I thought, in theory, were taking the place of other, 'better' stories that might have been. But it ain't so simple....

It may be that we only have Cthulhu and gang because of Dunsany's influence--but I still wish that HPL had written more Dagon-like stories in his early career instead of the slew of Dunsanian stories that followed. I guess I sort of have the view that Dunsany was a sort of pied piper that lured Lovecraft away from the Dagon vein--a vein he would not fully return to till much later--the vein which is my favorite, and Lovecraft's lasting legacy. I believe Dunsany was perhaps beneficial and potentially damaging to Lovecraft's total output--although that is really an absurd thing to say, since it is horribly skewed to my own taste :)

On the subject of the Romantic poets... Lovecraft frequently stated that he didn't much care for Byron, but -- despite criticizing him for, as Lovecraft put it, saddling us with that "truth-beauty" aphorism which has caused so much havoc -- Keats appears to have been, if not his favorite poet, very highly regarded by him. After all, he not only chose a passage from "The Eve of St. Agnes" for the epigram for "The Outsider", but it has been posited that it may in fact have been penned as a tribute to Keats on the centennial of his death. Shelley he seems to have been slightly less attracted to, but still had quite high praise for him.

Here are a few mentions from the Selected Letters, to give an idea:

(Speaking of the group of writers which included himself, Long, Loveman, etc.): "We belong to the wholly aesthete-pagan tradition of Keats, Poe, Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, & so on"... (SLII.276)

"For the soul & substance of poetry, there is no richer source than Keats. Join his spirit & fire to the simple language of straightforward conversation, & you have the utter apex of poetic possibility!" (SLII.336)

"You are dead right in exalting Keats & Shelley. They represent the absolute zenith of the poetic art." (SLIV.109-10)

(On the superiority of French culture to English... in general): "Another thing -- I hate a jabbering Frenchman with his little affectations & unctuous ways, & would defend the English culture & gtradition with my last drop of blood. But all the asme I can see clearly that the French have a profounder culture than we have -- that their intellectual perspective is infinitely clearer than ours, & that their tastes are infinitely further removed from animal simplicity. What Anglo-Saxon could have written Balzac's Comedie Humaine or Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal? It is only in poetic feeling of the main stream that we excel the French, so that in point of civilisation it is only figures like Shakespeare & Milton & Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, & Keats, that we can hold honestly above them." (SLIII.78)

He does cite Shelley on occasion, Keats more so, for their imaginative qualities, whereas he regarded the main Romantic tradition either with formal appreciation (again, generally speaking), or rather coldly... especially the prose Romantics following the close of the Gothic period. These, he tended to feel, falsified and forced emotion rather than honestly expressing those elusive mystical and fantastical feelings and moods which he found so congenial.

It is interesting to see his progression from a rather tongue-in-cheek dismissal of the French in his earlier years (when Galpin especially was attempting to get him to read such figures as Balzac, Gautier, etc.), and his later comments where he states quite frankly that he feels they were perhaps the apex in genuinely artistic treatment of human experience, and that several of them had taken place among his favorite authors.

I admit that I find this aspect of things quite fascinating, as it shows Lovecraft's growing critical judgment and the ever-widening range of those who, in one form or another, influenced him either in expanding the subject-matter, the manner of handling that matter, or general aesthetic approach to the sorts of literary themes which had their origins, of course, in his own experience and views.

I recently re-read The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, and a this time it is my favorite Lovecraft story (together with The Mound which I read late, not really giving the revisions a chance when I was younger.) The scene with the army of cats is especially rememberable. Algernon Blackwood wrote a book called The Education of Uncle Paul, which has a dreamlike landscape with many cats. I wonder if Lovecraft read that one.