A diversion: Sidney-Fryer on the poetry

I've recently been reading Donald Sidney-Fryer's excellent essay "The Sorcerer Departs", one of several essays that he has written about the works of Clark Ashton Smith (CAS).  This essay has been published in a number of different editions, and is currently available in collections from both La Clef d'Argent and Night Shade Books.

The following paragraph from that essay is particularly perceptive, and so I'm quoting it here in full:

Smith’s affinities with Baudelaire are so obvious as to pass almost without mention. However, we must allude to one fundamental affinity between Smith and Baudelaire. The French poet sought to create beauty out of the filth, the squalor, the disease, the evil and the horror of a great metropolis (Paris). Similarly, Smith sought to create beauty not so much out of the filth, the evil, the implicit or actual horror of one great city as he did out of the ugliness of death and decay and destruction, out of the horror of an irrevocable doom, out of the terror of an ultimate nothingness beyond death (what Sir Thomas Browne terms “the uncomfortable night of nothingness”), or paradoxically out of the possibility that there is no death, that all animate things whether in life or in death as well as all things inanimate—in short, absolutely all things—by virtue of their theoretically indestructible atoms are part and parcel of an inconceivably monstrous and perverse arch-life-form without beginning and without end whether in space or in time that involves not only the cosmos but also the void beyond the cosmos. (This last is given its most powerful symbolic embodiment in the “huge eyeless Face, / That fills the void and fills the universe, / And bloats against the limits of the world / With lips of flame that open,” in the tenth and final section of “The Hashish-Eater.”) If, as averred by Victor Hugo, Baudelaire did introduce into the literature of poetry “un frisson nouveau,” then Smith has in his own turn introduced “le frisson cosmique.”

This strikes me as a very perceptive interpretation of the larger world-view of CAS, and I am especially intrigued by the notion of CAS creating beauty "out of the possibility that there is no death, that all...things...are part and parcel of an inconceivably monstrous and perverse arch-life-form without beginning and without end".  

From my own readings to date of CAS' output in both prose and poetry, Sidney-Fryer's observation rings true, and provides something of a framework from which to approach CAS' intentions as an artist.  I'll be keeping this perspective in mind as I read further into CAS' poetic corpus.