The Thirst of Satan

Poems of Fantasy and Terror
Edited by S.T. Joshi

George Sterling is an unjustly forgotten American poet. The pupil of Ambrose Bierce and the mentor of Clark Ashton Smith, Sterling achieved early fame with such "cosmic" poems as The Testimony of the Suns and "A Wine of Wizardry." But these two works are just the most celebrated of many poems of fantasy and terror written by Sterling over a career that spanned three decades. A master of the sonnet, Sterling generated such masterworks as "The Black Vulture," "Three Sonnets on Oblivion," and "The Muse of the Incommunicable." Sterling's poems range from the ethereality of "To a Girl Dancing" to the grim sadism of "The Lords of Pain" to the bracing atheism of "To Science." This volume, the first selection of Sterling's verse in more than thirty years, will demonstrate why Sterling was so revered by Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, and especially Clark Ashton Smith, who in his own fantastic verse sought to build upon the foundations Sterling laid.

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