Thursday, December 10, 2020

Parnassus à la Mode

Read "Parnassus à la Mode" at The Eldritch Dark:

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/poetry/423/parnassus-À-la-mode

This is a cynical little poem from Clark Ashton Smith (CAS), denouncing the literary modernism of his own age for the desecration of ideals born of the legendary age of classical Greek mythology.  

Erato is the mythical muse of love poetry, and her sister Melpomene is the muse of tragedy.  Presumably these two were symbolically important to CAS in his role as a literary artist, and so the soiling of "the altars of the Muse" described in this poem is all the more tragic for him personally.    

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