Ebony and Crystal

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By Listen TheBook Posted on May 31, 2023

In Category - Single author

Authors: Clark Ashton Smith In Year : 1922

Book Language: English

Audiobook: Ebony and Crystal

Preface, by George Sterling
Arabesque
Beyond the Great Wall
To Omar Khayyam
Strangeness
The Infinite Quest
Rosa Mystica
The Nereid
In Saturn
Impression
Triple Aspect
Desolation
The Orchid
A Fragment
Crepuscle
Inferno
Mirrors
Belated Love
The Absence of the Muse
Dissonance
To Nora May French
In Lemuria
Recompense
Exotique
Transcendence
Satiety
The Ministers of Law
Coldness
The Desert Garden
The Crucifixion of Eros
The Exile
Ave Atque Vale
Solution
The Tears of Lilith
A Precept
Remembered Light
Song
Haunting
The Hidden Paradise
Cleopatra
Ecstasy
Union
Psalm
In November
Symbols
The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil, Part I
The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil, Part II
The Sorrow of the Winds
Artemis
Love is Not Yours, Love is Not Mine
The City in the Desert
The Melancholy Pool
The Mirrors of Beauty
Winter Moonlight
To the Beloved
Requiescat
Mirage
Inheritance
Autumnal
Chant of Autumn
Echo of Memnon
Twilight on the Snow
Image
The Refuge of Beauty
Nightmare
The Mummy
Forgetfulness
Flamingoes
The Chimaera
Satan Unrepentant
The Abyss Triumphant
The Motes
The Medusa of Despair
Laus Mortis
The Ghoul and the Seraph
At Sunrise
The Land of Evil Stars
The Harlot of the World
The Hope of the Infinite
Love Malevolent
Palms
Memnon at Midnight
Eidolon
The Kingdom of Shadows
Requiescat in Pace
Alexandrines
Ashes of Sunset
November Twilight
Sepulture
Quest
Beauty Implacable
A Vision of Lucifer
Desire of Vastness
Anticipation
A Psalm to the Best Beloved
The Witch in the Graveyard
The Traveler
The Flower-Devil
Images
The Black Lake
Vignettes
A Dream of Lethe
The Caravan
The Princess Almeena
Ennui
The Statue of Silence
Remoteness
The Memnons of the Night
The Garden and the Tomb
In Cocaigne
The Litany of the Seven Kisses
From a Letter
From the Crypts of Memory
A Phantasy
The Demon, the Angel, and Beauty
The Shadows

As stated in L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse, "Ebony and Crystal is an artist's intrepid repudiation of the world of trolleys and cash-registers, Freudian complexes and Binet-Simon tests, for realms of exalted and iridescent strangeness beyond space and time yet real as any reality because dreams have made them so. Mr. Smith has escaped the fetish of life and the world, and glimpsed the perverse, titanic beauty of death and the universe; taking infinity as his canvas and recording in awe the vagaries of suns and planets, gods, and daemons, and blind amorphous horrors that haunt gardens of polychrome fungi more remote than Algol and Achernar. It is a cosmos of vivid flame and glacial abysses that he celebrates, and the colorful luxuriance with which he peoples it could be born from nothing less than sheer genius.

The summation of Mr. Smith's exotic vision is perhaps attained in the long phantasmal procession of blank verse pentameters entitled, "The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil." In this frenzied plunge through nameless gulfs of interstellar terror the Californian presents a narcotic pageant of poisonous vermilious and paralysing shadows whose content is equalled only by its verbal medium; a medium involving one of the most opulent and fastidiously choice vocabularies ever commanded by a writer of English."

Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as one of the big three of Weird Tales, was a romantic-style poet, a Lovecraftian-style writer and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of the last great West Coast Romantics. Ebony and Crystal, published in 1922, was Smith's last collection of pure poetry.
- Summary by Mary Kay and L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse