Fungi from Yuggoth

Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets by cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the sonnets were written between 27 December 1929 – 4 January 1930; thereafter individual sonnets appeared in Weird Tales and other genre magazines. The sequence was published complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1943, 395–407) and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2001, 64–79; expanded 2nd ed, NY Hippocampus Press, 2013). Ballantine Books’ mass paperback edition, Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems (Random House, New York, 1971) included other poetic works.
The sequence has been printed in several different versions as standalone chapbooks. In June 1943, Bill Evans (Washington DC) issued a separate appearance which lacked the final three sonnets. In 1977 Necronomicon Press, (West Warwick, RI) issued the complete sequence as The Fungi from Yuggoth (475 numbered copies). This may have been the first time that the sequence was published in its corrected text. The same press went on to reissue it with new cover artwork by Jason Eckhardt in limited editions from 1982 onwards and other illustrated editions from different presses were to follow. In 2017 came a limited annotated edition of the sequence with illustrations by Jason Eckhardt for each poem (Hippocampus Press, New York). Lovecraft is known chiefly as a writer of genre fiction, several themes from which are reflected in his sonnet sequence. But the restrained style of the verse there so distinguishes it from the prose work that, in the view of some commentators, it "deserves to be more widely known and appreciated" for its own poetic merits. The work later appealed to musicians and there have been several settings of poems from it in a variety of genres.
Fungi from Yuggoth represents a marked departure from the mannered poems Lovecraft had been writing up to this point. Sending a copy of "Recapture" (which just predates the sequence but was later incorporated into it) the poet remarks that it is “illustrative of my efforts to practice what I preach regarding direct and unaffected diction”. He also describes it as “a sort of irregular semi-sonnet, based on an actual dream”. The sonnets that followed were hybrid in form insofar as they are partly based on the Petrarchan approach but invariably end with a rhyming couplet (as in the so-called Shakespearean sonnet) “contrived to provide an element of surprise in the final line”.
Varying opinions have been expressed in the critical literature on Lovecraft as to whether the poems form a continuous cycle which tells a story, or whether each individual sonnet is discrete. (See essays in Bibliography below by Boerem, Ellis, Schultz, Vaughan and Waugh). Phillip A. Ellis, in his essay "Unity in Diversity: Fungi from Yuggoth as a Unified Setting", discusses this problem and suggests a solution. S. T. Joshi considers that apart from the first three sonnets, "the remaining poems, which HPL considered suitable for publication independent of the introductory poems, are discontinuous vignettes concerning a variety of unrelated weird themes, told in the first person and (apparently) third person. The cumulative effect is that of a series of shifting dream images."
The first three poems in the sequence concern a person who obtains an ancient book of esoteric knowledge that seems to allow one to travel to parallel realities or strange parts of the universe. Later poems deal more with an atmosphere of cosmic horror, or create a mood of being shut out from former felicity, and do not have a strong narrative through-line except occasionally over a couple of sonnets (e.g. 17–18). In that the sequence starts by seeming to provide 'the key' to the author's 'vague visions' (Sonnet 3) of other realities behind the everyday, it might be argued that the poems that follow, though disparate in themselves, detail a succession of such visions that a reading of the book releases. With one or two exceptions, the concluding poems from "Expectancy" (28) onward seek to explain the circumstances of the narrator's sense of alienation within the present. Rather than visions themselves, these poems serve as a commentary on their source.
The sonnets see-saw between various themes in much the same way as do Lovecraft's short stories. There are references to the author's night terrors in "Recognition" (4), a potent source for his later fiction and carrying forward into dream poems related to his Dunsany manner; to intimations of an Elder Race on earth; and to nightmare beings from Beyond. That these themes often cross-fertilize each other is suggested by "Star Winds" (14), which taken purely by itself is an exercise in Dunsanian dream-lore. However, beginning in the month after finishing his sequence, Lovecraft set to work on his story The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) where Yuggoth is recreated as a planet of fungoid beings given the name of Mi-go. In the sonnet, the fungi sprout in a location called Yuggoth, not on an alien planet; and in its following line Nithon is described as a world with richly flowering continents rather than, as in the story, Yuggoth's occulted moon. This is a good instance of how Lovecraft gave himself license to be self-contradictory and vary his matter according to the artistic need of the moment, of which the diversity of conflicting situations within the whole sequence of sonnets is itself an example. Or, as he himself puts it in "Star Winds",
In addition to The Whisperer in Darkness, the cycle references other works by Lovecraft and introduces a number of ideas that he would expand upon in later works.