Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as one of the big three of Weird Tales, was a romantic-style poet, a Lovecraftian-style writer and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of the last great West Coast Romantics. The Star-Treader and Other Poems, published at the age of 19, was his first volume of poetry and his breakout hit.

As stated in L'Alouette: A Magazine of Verse, "Ebony and Crystal is an artist's intrepid repudiation of the world of trolleys and cash-registers, Freudian complexes and Binet-Simon tests, for realms of exalted and iridescent strangeness beyond space and time yet real as any reality because dreams have made them so. Mr. Smith has escaped the fetish of life and the world, and glimpsed the perverse, titanic beauty of death and the universe; taking infinity as his canvas and recording in awe the vagaries of suns and planets, gods, and daemons, and blind amorphous horrors that haunt gardens of polychrome fungi more remote than Algol and Achernar...

Clark Ashton Smith, nicknamed one of the "big three" of Weird Tales , was also a romantic-style poet, contributor to the Cthulhu Mythos and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of the last great West Coast Romantics. Published in 1918, prefaced by his mentor George Sterling and illustrated with Decadent movement-inspired embellishments by Florence Lundborg, this volume contains material republished from his 1912 collection and later included in his 1922 poetry compilation.