Lilith: A Dramatic Poem is an acclaimed four-act fantasy verse drama written in blank verse by American poet and playwright George Sterling from 1904 to 1918, and first published in 1919. The New York Times declared Lilith “the finest thing in poetic drama yet done in America and one of the finest poetic dramas yet written in English.”Percy A. Hutchison, “Poetic Drama Did Not Die with Stephen Phillips,” New York Times Review of Books (August 22, 1926), p. 9.
Author Theodore Dreiser said of Lilith: “It rings richer in thought than any American dramatic poem with which I am familiar.”Theodore Dreiser, “Introduction,” Lilith: A Dramatic Poem (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. xi. Poet Clark Ashton Smith wrote: “Lilith is certainly the best dramatic poem in English since the days of Swinburne and Browning. … The lyrics interspersed throughout the drama are as beautiful as any by the Elizabethans.”Clark Ashton Smith, “Praise for Sterling,” Oakland Enquirer (January 10, 1920), p.8. Influential critic H. L. Mencken said of Sterling: “I think his dramatic poem Lilith was the greatest thing he ever wrote.”“Poet Found Dead in Bed in S. F. Club,” Oakland Tribune (November 17, 1926), p. 1. Thirty-four years later, in his book George Sterling, Thomas E. Benediktsson, agreed: “The allegorical Lilith is undoubtedly Sterling’s best poem.”Thomas E. Benediktsson, George Sterling (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 136.
Creation of the play Lilith was the longest in gestation of all Sterling’s works. Sterling began Lilith on the fifth of September 1904, when he and his wife Carrie lived in Piedmont, California. In two afternoons he wrote the play’s entire first act.1904 start: “George Sterling Is to Lead Life of Poet,” San Francisco Examiner (March 31, 1905), p. 2: “That was on the 5th and 9th of last September, and during those two afternoons I wrote an entire act of a blank verse play which I hope to produce one day. It is called Lilith.” See also Sterling September 10, 1904 letter to Ambrose Bierce: George Sterling, Dear Master: Letters of George Sterling to Ambrose Bierce, 1900-1912, Roger K. Larson, ed. (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 2002), p. 80: “I’ve begun on an allegorical tragedy entitled Lilith, or Temptation, which can probably be acted.” He didn’t have his first act polished enough to show his mentor Ambrose Bierce until six years later, in 1910.Bierce October 1, 1910 letter to Sterling expressing Bierce’s approval of Act One: A Splendid Poison: The Letters of Ambrose Bierce and George Sterling, ed. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2024), p. 389.
At that point, Sterling doubted he could finish Lilith, so he put his draft away for seven years.Sterling’s doubts: February 4, 1911 letter to Bierce, Dear Master, p. 119. For more on Sterling’s initial work and problems with Lilith, see George Sterling, Complete Poetry, S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, eds. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), vol. 2, pp. 730-731. Credit for reviving Lilith goes to Nebraska poet John Neihardt, best known for Black Elk Speaks. After Carrie divorced Sterling in 1914, he visited Neihardt’s home in Bancroft, Nebraska. Sterling told Neihardt about his unfinished Lilith, and Neihardt urged Sterling to work on it again. Sterling did not, so for three years Neihardt badgered him by mail, mentioning Lilith again and again until Sterling picked his play up again in 1917. Neihardt responded: “So at last it has come to pass that my Scipionic cry—Hodie, hodie, Lilith scribenda est! [Latin for “Today, today, Lilith must be written!”]—has had some effect? Hooray! It's the very best kind of news. If you had told me that your rich Uncle had just given you a check for a hundred thousand, I would have been but little moved. But I know now that you are most probably writing your masterpiece, and that it is a matter for rejoicing.”Neihardt September 5, 1917 letter to Sterling and other letters to Sterling: http://neihardt.unl.edu/search/all/?&sort=dateSort&q=recipient:%22Sterling,%20George,%201869-1926%22
Neihardt visited Sterling in San Francisco from late February through early March 1918. Sterling showed Neihardt his unfinished draft play.H. L. Mencken and George Sterling, From Baltimore to Bohemia: The Letters of H. L. Mencken and George Sterling, S. T. Joshi, ed. (Madison, Wisconsin: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), p. 251, note 5. By this point, Sterling had acquired more experience writing plays in blank verse, including his well-reviewed The Play of Everyman. He completed a “rough” first draft of Lilith on April 3, 1918.Sterling April 3, 1918 letter to Clark Ashton Smith: George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith, The Shadow of the Unattained: The Letters of George Sterling and Clark Ashton Smith, David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, eds. (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2005), p. 157. “I have followed the main poetic (dramatic) tradition as to the form of the poem,” he later explained, “but have put more sheer beauty (I hope) into it than has gone into other American dramatic poems, for the reason that I was after more than drama. I made the poem moon-haunted, as a symbol of the illusory quality of love and idealism generally, and I ended it with a contrast between pleasure and pain as indicative of that strangest and most awful of human faculties, our ability to be happy when we know others are in agony. I can never forgive myself nor humanity for that. … I think that the poem, in its modernity as to astronomical truth, and its conception of pleasure and pain as the two realities goes deeper in thought than other American dramatic poems, for it does not take life as a bad joke, for pain demands more pity than that.”Sterling February 13, 1926 letter to Theodore Dreiser: George Sterling: The Letters of George Sterling, Dalton Harvey Gross, ed. (PhD diss: Southern Illinois University, 1968), p. 538. Reprinted in Dalton H. Gross, “George Sterling’s Letters to Theodore Dreiser,” Dreiser Newsletter v. 4 n. 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 16-17. Letter excerpted by Dreiser in his “Introduction” to Lilith, pp. ix-x.
Sterling completed a finished draft titled Lilith: A Dramatic Poem later in 1918 and sent it to potential publishers.Sent to publishers: From Baltimore to Bohemia, Sterling September 10, 1918, September 30, 1918, and October 30, 1918 letters to H. L. Mencken, pp. 38-39, p. 40, and p. 41; Shadow of the Unattained, Sterling April 18, 1918, September 9, 1918, and February 11, 1919 letters to Clark Ashton Smith, p. 158, p. 164, and p. 169; Letters of George Sterling, Sterling March 15, 1919 letter to Walter Adolphe Roberts, p. 406. He gave his original manuscript in gratitude to Neihardt, who responded: “I have read Lilith at a single sitting, and it was certainly a fine experience. Apart from the mood of the whole (which is of supreme importance) there must be no less than one hundred lines that are as bewitching as any in the Language.”Neihardt June 16, 1918 letter to Sterling from website cited above. See also Thomas E. Benediktsson, George Sterling (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 136-137.
Synopsis Act One: In the garden-close of a medieval castle in France, King Urlan walks with his twenty-year-old son, Prince Tancred, speaking fondly of the king’s dead queen, Tancred’s mother. They come upon Lilith in a diaphanous green robe. Powerful lust overcomes both men. When asked her name, Lilith refuses to identify herself but says her sisters are Joy and Death. The king sends Tancred away and asks Lilith to become his queen. He promises to give her three chests of gems. She wants only one specific ruby. His dead queen wears that ruby. The king refuses and offers: “Take all else, and rule.” She refuses his offer. He threatens her with fire and torture. She says she cannot be restrained by manacles nor burned by fire and tells him to show his sword. The king unsheathes his sword, which Lilith touches, and his blade falls in fragments. He says he might give her the ruby. She says she will return tomorrow, turns, and disappears.
The next morning finds Prince Tancred and Lilith in the garden-close. He lusts for her, and she says her price is the ruby on his mother’s corpse. Tancred refuses. Lilith embraces him and he gives in. In the castle’s vast, dark, vaulted crypt, Tancred holds a torch and with Lilith searches for his mother’s tomb. They find it. Tancred lifts the silver lid and sees his mother’s corpse. He hesitates, but Lilith goads him and he takes the ruby. King Urlan appears and calls Tancred “traitor.” The two men and Lilith quarrel over the ruby. The men draw swords and fight. Lilith thrusts the torch in the King’s eyes, blinding him, and he is wounded by Tancred’s sword. King Urlan dies. Lilith takes the ruby and tells Tancred she will return in seven years.
Act Two: Seven years later, Tancred and his friend Gavain ride horses to a wizard’s cavern seeking forecasts of their futures. They do not like and cannot understand the wizard’s prophecies. Tancred and Gavain ride next to a lake. Tancred sings “A Song of Friendship.” They stop at the lake and strip to swim. Tancred swims to an islet with marble ruins where Lilth rises up from the water. They embrace, kneeling. Gavain shouts from the far shore. Tancred rises to go to him, but Lilith persuades him to stay. They hear Gavain twice more, but Tancred stays to embrace and kiss Lilith. Then she slips from Tancred’s arms, tells him his friend is dead, and sinks into the lake.
Act Three: Three years later, Tancred rides a horse up hills toward snow-capped mountains. He meets a shepherd, Geoffrey, who offers the traveler a place to sleep in his home. Tancred and Geoffrey’s daughter Amara fall in love. In the autumn of the next year, Lilith appears to Tancred. She persuades him to leave the shepherd’s home to find adventure. A week later in a wood they hear young women sing a dirge. The women are part of a funeral procession, with young men bearing Amara’s body. Tancred stops the procession and speaks of his regret. The funeral cortege resumes. “Tancred turns alone to the mountains.”
Act Four: Twenty years later on the wall of a castle in snow-covered mountains, a cook, Odo the fool, and Raoul the troubadour talk. Their King Gerbert has a new young woman, Jehanne, who might be a witch. They also distrust fifty-year-old Tancred, who has lived in the castle in “his narrow cell” for seven years, searching for wisdom. In the throne room, Jehanne—who is Lilith—persuades King Gerbert to invite Tancred to a banquet to interrogate him and see if he is a threat. Three days later, at a banquet, the king, Lilith, the archbishop, and the chancellor decide Tancred’s ideas are heretical and dangerous. He will be tortured and executed. The king’s men-at-arms take Tancred away.
Two days later, at midnight, Tancred is locked in a tower room. Lilith appears. She makes the tower walls and roof disappear, and debates with Tancred over what they see. She fails to persuade Tancred to change his views to save his own life.
The next midnight, next to a fountain in a castle garden, Jehanne-Lilith seduces Raoul. They hear Tancred’s groans of pain coming from a small, low dungeon window; he is being tortured to death. Raoul stuffs Lilith’s ears with rose petals so she cannot hear Tancred’s groans and the two have sex on the grass.
Book publications During Sterling’s lifetime, three editions of Lilith: A Dramatic Poem were published.
1919 self-published paperback first edition