My two-part article “Lovecraft’s Longing,” which I wrote for Art Throb, and whose first part I announced in a previous post, is now finished and published. In Part Two I explain how, in the words of the introduction,
Lovecraft was “about” more than just the horrors of bodily corruption and cosmic monstrosity that cling so tenaciously to his reputation, and the failure of some critics to recognize, understand, and/or accept this fact may be injecting a falsely negative and one-sided view of him into the collective cultural conversation. Furthermore – and of particular interest to the Art Throb audience – one of the chief places where one can find the kinder, gentler Lovecraft on display is in the man’s emotional relationship to the natural and man-made landscape of Massachusetts (and more generally, New England) itself, which, as we’ll see, was for him not only a locus of Gothic darkness but a source of poetic longing.