The Ancient Track

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. He was virtually unknown and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow over Innsmouth", both canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft was never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor. He saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time that he died at age 46.

The publication in 2001 of The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft was a landmark. For the first time, all of Lovecraft's 500 or more poems-including hundreds of Christmas greetings, untitled poems, fragments, and poems embedded in his published and unpublished letters-were gathered in accurate texts, with critical commentary and full bibliography.Since that time, a dozen or more poems or poetic fragments have been discovered by scholars and researchers, and this new edition prints these items along with several other works of interest. Poems that Lovecraft revised for various authors are included, along with (where extant) the original poems that served as the basis for the revisions. The original versions of poems by Ovid, Horace, and other classical poets that Lovecraft translated are provided. And the commentary and bibliography have been thoroughly revised and updated.It can well be said that this second edition of The Ancient Track is the definitive collection of Lovecraft's entire poetic output. It has been edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft and the editor of Lovecraft's collected fiction, revisions, essays, and letters.