Moe in 1931, «a sense of peril and falling-off was strong within me, so that I felt a kinship to Poe’s gloomy heroes with their broken fortunes » 0). «Even before my grandfather’s death (1904), » he wrote to Maurice W. Defensively, Lovecraft dreamed himself a world where he was, like Roderick Usher, the last offspring of a noble line, doomed to the equivocal rewards of a hypersensitive constitution and an overly-refined sensibility. Even within the pre¬ cincts of his own much-touted genealogy, Lovecraft was an outsi¬ der, and the delight which he took in linking his name with the first families of Providence was in some measure a fanciful com¬ pensation for his own very real obscurity and unimportance in the cosmic scheme of things. «I thank the powers of the cosmos that I am a Rhode Island Englishman of the old tradition ! » he often exclai¬ med in his letters to younger friends, even though the fact is that Lovecraft was rejected by his more prosperous and prominent Yankee relatives, who thought of him as «queer », «crazy as a bed-bug », and an inveterate ne’er-do-well. The popular conception of Lovecraft, and the image which HPL himself consciously projected in his later years, is that of the staunch New England gentleman, a gentleman of decidedly Puri¬ tan extraction. Philippe Jullian has referred to turn-of-the-centuty artists suggesting the corruption of Byzantium as Dreamers.
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