“I am probably the least sensuous of all living beings; being almost exclusively visual and quasi-abstract in imagination, and tending to view and enjoy all things as a passive, detached, and sometimes remote spectator. Those arts which appeal most to the ideational imagination—the sense of drama, pageantry, historic flux, collective organisation, or escape from the natural limitations of time, space, and natural law—are undoubtedly those which appeal chiefly to me. Even my strong love of architectural and decorative beauty is probably largely dependent upon the historical bearings of the forms and motifs in which I delight. I am not wholly insensible to abstract form, but seem to relish the associative element in art more instantly and acutely than the lyrical or mathematical element... I don't really revel in anything unless it reminds me of something else either real or visionary—unless it opens up visual avenues of linked pseudo-recollections leading to sensations of ego-expansion and liberation... usually bringing in the element of time, somehow based on the past, and harbouring hints of an elusive, intangible kind of adventurous expectancy.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Virgil Finlay (25 September 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 310
Non-Fiction, Letters

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H.P. Lovecraft203

American author 1890–1937

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