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Tycho, v. 1, issue 2, November 1942

Page 15

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The 'NEVER-MORE" POETRY S.A. McELFRESH The croakings of that "gaunt ungainly bird", whose refrain rings on forever, finds more echoes on the contemporary scene today than ever before. Poets by the dozens are turning out verse in that key, much of it being extremely high quality. Never has the genre of the weird-fantastic in poetry been so widely or so ably represented. The glittering galaxy of Lorraine, Coblentz, C.A. Smith, Hurley, Lovecraft, Drake, etc, fairly sparkles with sun-gems of the first magnitude. Even the lesser orbs glow with a brilliance that just misses being scintillant. The keenest pleasure that came from the writer's introduction to stf was his discovery of the trove of treasure that he had somehow overlooked hitherto. But there was one drawback -- the poems were not too easily to be found. "Pick me up a good representative anthology of fantasy-weird verse....." Thus I wrote to a correspondent in the east about two years ago. I expected to be referred to one of two of a half-dozen good anthologies featuring verse of the weird-fantasy genre. I was flabbergasted to get the following: "Sorry. Don't know of any such anthology..." Subsequent investigations showed this amazing condition to be a fact. And to this day, the writer has never been able to discover what could be called an anthology of fantasy-weird verse. Dozens of better-than-average writers producing reams of good to indifferent poems, ranging from light fantasy to the deepest horror, and not even a bad anthology of it! Nothing at all to hand a friend when he betrays curiosity--no convenient collection to delight one's self! Amazing, but sadly true. A few of the better poets who write in this genre, have had books published. But even these are not wholly devoted to editions of fantasy-weird verse, and most were strictly limited, that are not easy to secure. A few mimeographed and printed pamphlets have been produced in even more limited editions. Save for there random contributions, the great mass of fascinating "never-more" poetry remains locked up in back-issues of scattered magazines - if one can find the magazines! Failing to find an f-w anthology, it was quite natural for the writer to toy with the idea of compiling one. But at the
 
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