H.P. Lovecraft: "Polaris" {read by Clay Beauchamp}

H.P. Lovecraft: "Polaris" {read by Clay Beauchamp}

Channel:
United States Christopher MacIntyre
Subscribers:
10,100
Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r6qf_fGCVg


Game:
Polaris (1980)
Duration: 10:21
68 views
2

"Polaris" is a fantasy short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1918 and first published in the December 1920 issue of the amateur journal The Philosopher. It is the story that introduces Lovecraft's fictional Pnakotic Manuscripts, the first of his arcane tomes.

In the story, an unnamed narrator describes his nightly obsession with the Pole star, and his recurring dreams of a city under siege. The narrator struggles with determining whether his reality is real, or if his dream is the true reality. Critics have noted autobiographical elements in the story, and have connected it with Lovecraft's experiences of uselessness during World War I.

Critic William Fulwiler writes that "'Polaris' is one of Lovecraft's most autobiographical stories, reflecting his feelings of guilt, frustration, and uselessness during World War I. Like the narrator, Lovecraft was 'denied a warrior's part', for he 'was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships'".

Like many Lovecraft stories, "Polaris" was in part inspired by a dream, which he described in a letter: "Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city--a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills.... I was, as I said, aware of this city visually. I was in it and around it. But certainly I had no corporeal existence."

Lovecraft remarked on the peculiar similarity of the story's style to that of Lord Dunsany, whose work he would not read for another year. An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggests that Lovecraft and Dunsany were both influenced by the prose poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

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*read for LibriVox by Clay Beauchamp
Librivox (Short Ghost and Horror Collection 016)
https://librivox.org/short-ghost-and-horror-story-collection-vol-016-by-various/

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(Music):
"Lost Frontier", & "Tempting Secrets"
by Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com)
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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At present, Christopher MacIntyre has 68 views spread across 1 video for Polaris, with his channel publishing less than an hour of Polaris content. This is less than 0.12% of the total video content that Christopher MacIntyre has uploaded to YouTube.