The imminent arrival of Rhymes of Salem Town got me thinking about Robert E. Howard’s poetry. With some 125 poems contained in that volume, most not seen before, and around 240 similarly unseen poems in the Collected Letters, there’s plenty for fans of Howard’s verse to be happy about: more than 300 previously unpublished poems on the way or almost on the way. To the best of my knowledge only three poems will appear in both Salem Town and the Letters, that’s 362 poems hot off the presses. Damn, how many poems did Howard write? And what’s it going to take to get them all?

After perusing The Neverending Hunt and making a few corrections and additions (with Paul Herman’s help, of course), I’ve come up with a grand total of 700 poems. Actually, I only counted 699, but I’m sure that number will turn out to be wrong; might go up, could go down. After acquiring the above mentioned volumes, the Howard poetry collector still needs to obtain more than 300 poems! And I thought getting all the prose was hard.

Without resorting to the impossible-to-find small-press publications, Howard’s poetry is still pretty tough to collect. Sure, most fans already have Always Comes Evening, but that only contains 70 (!) poems. There’s still more than 250 to be had. Even with volumes like Singers in the Shadows, Night Images, Verses in Ebony, etc., the Complete Poetry is still a ways off.

For example, “All Hallow’s Eve” has only been published twice: once in the March 1986 issue of Amazing Stories and again in The “New” Howard Reader #1; it has never been collected in a volume of verse. Nor has “Buccaneer Treasure,” which only appears in the January 1985 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories and the second issue of The “New” Howard Reader. And the list goes on, including “The Ballad of King Geraint,” arguably one of Howard’s most important pieces of verse, and inarguably his longest. This is only available in an ultra-rare chapbook or The “New” Howard Reader #6; and we all know how difficult it is to find copies of that. What’s a poetry fan to do?

At least as early as June of 2001 fans have been clamoring for The Complete Poetry. At Howard Days that year, the collection was announced as one of the “Wandering Star projects.” One post on the Inner Circle that same year had the Complete Poetry arriving the following summer, in 2002, as well as several other Howard projects. Well, we all know what happened with Wandering Star. . .

The creation of the Robert E. Howard Foundation late last year has pumped new life into these old projects: the remaining unpublished prose, the letters, . . . the poetry? Over on the Conan.com board, Paul Herman, a member of the board of directors, has made a few veiled suggestions (mostly to one “Buxom Sorceress” that the Complete Poetry might not be as dead as it appears, but he does caution that any such collection could be a “couple years” away. Regardless of the status of the Complete Poetry, with its current publishing schedule the REH Foundation is ushering into print more than 90% of Howard’s remaining unpublished verse. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.