jimrockhill2001 Wrote:
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>
> A welcome volume. Hoping someone will also
> eventually look at the 18th century influences on
> Lovecraft's prose. Dunsany's and Poe's influence
> have been explored, but when you look at the
> essay-like openings to "The Call of Cthulhu", "The
> Colour out of Space" or "The Dunwich Horror" or
> the clarity and restraint used in the description
> of such indescribable events as the emergence of
> Cthulhu, it is difficult not to think of the
> balance sought and achieved by John Dryden,
> Alexander Poper, Samuel Johnson, and others in
> prose and poetry.
>
> The key line in "The Call of Cthulhu" - "After
> vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose
> again, and ravening for delight." - is so
> well-balanced, so memorable, and so suffused with
> implication that I doubt even Alexander Pope could
> have matched it, and yet that odd little phrase
> "ravening for delight" is precisely the sort of
> commixture we might expect of Pope (or John Keats)
> - a phrase that seems disjunct at first, perhaps
> even bathetic, but soon seems perfectly apt and
> ineradicable from memory.
Not to toot my own horn, but the forthcoming book on Lovecraft and Influence -- in which Gavin is also represented, if I understand correctly -- has an essay I wrote on this topic. Unfortunatey, the constraints of space (5000 words) doesn't allow of the sort of in-depth examination we're talking about here, but I do take a look at several of the writers of the period, and attempt to show examples not only of direct stylistic influences (including similar passages, usage, etc.) but also how they may have influenced some of the themes and philosophy of his work.
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www.amazon.com]
I'm quite interested in Gavin's entry here, as well.
As for that comment about "the first scholarly study of its kind"... it depends on what they mean, I suppose. Perhaps of its particular type, yes; but in a more general sense, there have been a huge number of
very scholarly works on Lovecraft, academic and otherwise, several of which are really very good, fascinating and even entertaining....