An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,a ship-captain who is in the employ of Joseph Curwen in eighteenth-century Providence. Evidently under some terrible compulsion, he is forced to permit Curwen to marry his only daughter, Eliza, so that Curwen can repair his reputation in Providence society. Eliza and Curwen have a daughter, Ann. After Curwen’s apparent death, Eliza resumes her maiden name; Ann Tillinghast later marries Welcome Potter, Charles Dexter Ward’s great-greatgrandfather.

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Tilton, Anna.

In “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the curator of the Newburyport Historical Society who shows Robert Olmstead the strange marine-motif jewelry associated with Innsmouth, which he later recognizes among jewelry that belonged to his great-grandmother.

T’la-yub.

In “The Mound,” a noblewoman in Panfilo de Zamacona’s “affection-group” who attempts to escape the underworld realm with Zamacona but fails hideously: captured by the mound denizens, she is tortured in the amphitheatre and becomes a half-dematerialized corpse-slave who is stationed as a guard at the entrance of the mound. It is her occasional appearance aboveground that leads to rumors of a ghost haunting the mound.

“To a Dreamer.”

Poem (24 lines in quatrains); written on April 25, 1920. First published in the Coyote(January 1921); rpt. WT(November 1924).

The narrator scans the features of a nameless dreamer and wonders where his “dream-steps” have led him. The poem contains the first mentions of such terms (used later in HPL’s stories) as the “peaks of Thok” and the “vaults of Zin”; the “vale of Pnath” is also mentioned, although Pnath had first been coined in “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919). HPL notes in a letter to Frank Belknap Long (June 4, 1921; AHT) that the poem was founded on an idea occurring among Baudelaire’s notes and jottings (presumably from Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry,ed. T.R.Smith [Modern Library, 1919], which HPL owned and which was the source of the epigraph in “Hypnos”). “To a Sophisticated Young Gentleman, Presented by His Grandfather with a Volume of Contemporary Literature.”

Poem (82 lines); written on December 15, 1928. First published in SL2.255–57.

The poem was written to accompany a copy of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way,which HPL presented to Frank Belknap Long for Christmas. In the course of the poem HPL delivers telling blows on the freakishness and extravagance of much modern literature and the culture that produced it. In the first published appearance (a letter to James F.Morton, [January 1929]), the poem bears a variant title: “An Epistle to Francis, Ld. Belknap….”

“To Charlie of the Comics.”

Poem (32 lines in 4 stanzas); probably written in late September 1915. First published in the Providence Amateur(February 1916).

A poem on Charlie Chaplin. It was written in response to Rheinhart Kleiner’s poem “To Mary of the Movies” ( Piper,September 1915), about Mary Pickford. HPL professed enjoyment of Chaplin’s films, many of which he saw (see SL1.18, 50–51). For another poem on films, see the satire “To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema” (written August 1917; first published in the United Amateur, November 1919), a reply to Kleiner’s “To a Movie Star,” published in the same issue of the United Amateur

“To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures.”

Poem (sonnet); written in December 1936. First published in WT(April 1938) (as “To Clark Ashton Smith”).

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A tribute to HPL’s longtime colleague, the poem bears at least one variant title (“To Klarkash-Ton, Lord of Averoigne”) alluding to the fictitious region in medieval France invented by Smith in some of his tales. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” and other tales, HPL alludes to Smith (as he does repeatedly in his letters to him) as Klarkash-Ton.

“To Mr. Finlay, upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch’s Tale, ‘The Faceless God.’” Poem (sonnet); written on November 30, 1936. First published in the Phantagraph(May 1937); rpt. WT(July 1937).