"THE OUTPOST" [poem]. TYPED MANUSCRIPT (TMs), with several autograph corrections in Lovecraft's hand, on two sheets of letter-size paper, glued together along left edge. Lovecraft's name and address (10 Barnes St.) is typed at upper left of first page, and the date "1930" is written in ink at end of poem on page two. Ribbon copy. First published in the Spring 1930 issue of the amateur magazine BACON'S ESSAYS. This is a circulating copy (typed prior to 15 May 1933 when HPL moved to 66 College Street), with "please return" in Lovecraft's hand at top right corner of first leaf. Thirteen quatrains of rhymed iambic tetrameter. Makes an interesting companion piece to the "Astrophobos," in which the poet takes some of his first steps towards the theme of the malign universe. Here we see him in full possession of that theme. The King of Zimbabwe goes out at night and sees on the edge of the veldt a bastion of windowless towers and domes sprung from the ground like "leprous fungi." Between them and the "starless voids" he sees alien shapes "seething" back and forth. This is one of the outposts of the old ones, one of millions of such places around the universe, "Abhorred by every living race." The King creeps back to his palace -- and troubled dreams. A fine statement of the Lovecraftian cosmology and interesting for its casting of a black African in the role of a sympathetic hero (HPL was generally xenophobic). See Joshi I-B-iii-138. Numerous old mailing folds with short edge tears at two of them, else very good. Provenance: Derleth Papers. (#176354).
Price: $2,500.00
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