The Quest of Iranon by H. P. Lovecraft

The Quest of Iranon by H P Lovecraft.mp3

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"The Quest of Iranon" was written in February 1921 and first published in The Galleon in July 1935, and it belongs to the group of Dunsanian tales Lovecraft produced in the early 1920s, alongside "Celephaïs," "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," and "The Cats of Ulthar." In these stories he borrowed Lord Dunsany's manner, with its mythic cadence, invented geography, and plaintive sense of beauty lost, and he set them in the Dreamlands rather than in the New England of his cosmic horror. Where those other tales end in revenge or uncanny transformation, "Iranon" is notable for its quiet, elegiac cruelty: a wandering singer searches for the golden city of Aira, mocked by the practical men of Teloth, and only at the end learns that the city exists nowhere outside his own longing. The story is one of Lovecraft's most nakedly personal, since the poet unfit for a utilitarian world, the lost childhood home, and the dream that outlives the dreamer all echo his own nostalgia for a vanished Providence and the aristocratic ease of his grandfather's house. Its cosmic indifference is the same as in his later horror, but here the universe's blankness is felt as sorrow rather than dread, and it prefigures the more fully developed treatment of dream and loss in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.