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Rating: H.P. Lovecraft, in the final years of his life, wrote a letter during a moment of despair where he emphasized how no writer he knew (himself included) had ever reached the heights of cosmic terror of Edgar Allan Poe. This is, objectively, an exaggerated judgment: Lovecraft, on the other hand, always tended to downplay the value of his own work, but nonetheless, this letter highlights once again one of the key concepts of his aesthetic philosophy. Based on this reference, it becomes very interesting to know the deep connections between the Bostonian and the solitary man from Providence. To satisfy this curiosity, the excellent essay by Sandro Fossemò entitled “Cosmic Terror from Poe to Lovecraft”, which is dedicated to the analysis of the different ways of expressing "cosmic terror" in the works of these two well-known writers of the fantastic, is finally being released in e-book form.
For Jacques Bergier, Lovecraft was a “cosmic Poe”. This is a fascinating and, in its own way, fitting definition. In reality, these are authors who start from different backgrounds: Poe is culturally imbued with Romantic idealism, while Lovecraft starts from the bases of scientific materialism. But, that being said, Lovecraft considered Poe the greatest of all primarily because of his decadent sensibility and his style, which allowed him to reach levels of pure sublime art (Lovecraft would indeed say: “cosmic terror”) that influenced Baudelaire and the entire French symbolism movement. It is no coincidence that De Turris and Fusco included Poe's fragment “The Lighthouse” in the old edition of the anthology “The Cthulhu Mythos” (inexplicably removed in the recent reprint in Mondadori's Oscar Draghi) to highlight the connection between the two writers. Fossemò acutely points out how Lovecraftian cosmic terror, despite the various differences (Borges considered him an involuntary parodist of Poe), transforms from that of Poe into a fascinating and original “materialistic and mythological evolution”, reaching a sort of “horrific science fiction”, even though, to be more precise, we must remember that the late Giuseppe Lippi spoke of “dark science fiction”. For Poe, terror comes from the soul, but for Lovecraft, it stems from Cosmic Chaos. In the end, Poe's “terror of the soul” flows into cosmic terror. Just think of the terrifying finale in stories like “Metzengerstein” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”. On the contrary, Lovecraft makes, so to speak, “explode” cosmic horror into the delirium of the soul.
To fully understand Poe’s thought, cited not by chance by Fossemò, one must read the long essay “Eureka”, in which Poe argues that “everything was created by the will of God”; here echoes of Schelling's Romantic idealism and the German philosopher Schleiermacher can be detected. Lovecraft, on the other hand, draws inspiration significantly from Schopenhauer's thought and, partly, also from Nietzsche, where the essay introduces the theory of the Eternal Return. In this sense, the underestimated Lovecraftian story “Winged Death” is cited. Eugene Thacker, on the cosmic pessimism of Schopenhauer, has conducted a remarkable study in his fundamental essay “In the Dust of This Planet”, where he writes: “In terms of metaphysical misanthropy and cosmic pessimism, Schopenhauer has no rivals. And if we wanted to find someone capable of rivaling Schopenhauer, we should not turn to philosophy, but to those supernatural horror authors like H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories evoke a gleam of what he called cosmic exteriority”. Surely another important philosopher to remember when talking about Lovecraft is Oswald Spengler, and in particular, his fundamental volume “The Decline of the West”, whose considerations on the decline of Western civilization were adopted by HPL. The essay mentions that besides Poe, there was also the influence of Lord Dunsany and Machen in Lovecraftian cosmic terror. The connection is undoubtedly true if we consider the cosmogony of Lord Dunsany or the Welshman Arthur Machen, with his idea of the existence of the Little People and the hint of an occult dimension of reality hidden from our eyes. But we must not forget to also add William Hope Hodgson who, albeit with varying stylistic results, nonetheless influenced Lovecraft’s later works with his black and apocalyptic cosmicism. In his well-known essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” Lovecraft wrote concerning Hodgson's novel “The House On The Borderland” that “The wanderings of the narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity, and his chronicle of the ultimate destruction of the solar system, constitute something almost unique in contemporary literature”. The extensive (perhaps overly so) and excessive “The Night Land” (recently reprinted by Fanucci) goes even further. Probably it is in the most apocalyptic images of Hodgson that we find the essence of true cosmic terror theorized by Lovecraft (surely Hodgson knew Poe but had not read Lovecraft). In the end, Hodgson's problem is the stylistic discontinuity that partly undermines the final result. Lovecraft codified and perfected Hodgson's visions, creating, with “cosmic horror”, a true literary genre connected to science fiction but that, at the same time, lives a life of its own. Fritz Leiber defined him in this regard as a “literary Copernicus”. It is important not to forget the historical period in which Lovecraft was operating where science was dismantling old certainties and suggested new horrors hidden in the cosmos. It was also the time of Freud and psychoanalysis with the important discovery of the unconscious and its phantoms. However, Lovecraft despised Freud and his theories, which he considered childish and, though an atheist and a materialist, was not a radical positivist or an arid scientist. Lovecraft's great merit was to refresh the old trappings of Gothic fiction like vampires, ghosts, and demons while still acknowledging the fundamental influence of Poe with his soul-terror that projects outwards, merging with a metaphysical and cosmic terror. Today, the situation has reversed and it appears that horror fiction tends to recover old tropes in an updated version, which we can see with the success of Stephen King. Apparently, the times of Lovecraft or Poe are not so distant and Sandro Fossemò's essay is proof of it...
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