IMP: The Collected Poetry of Benjamin DeCasseres | 2nd Edition

Benjamin DeCasseres (1873–1945) was one of America’s most unruly men of letters—a journalist-polemicist-poet who moved with equal audacity through satire, aphorism, and metaphysics. A contemporary of the avant-garde and the mass press alike, he helped usher Nosferatu to its first U.S. release and, with theatrical bravado, was filmed taking the first legal drink after Prohibition. His poetry is where the full voltage lives: hymns of revolt and litanies of negation that fuse Symbolist decadence, American irreverence, and Nietzschean individualism. In these pages DeCasseres casts himself among mythic masks—Satan, Vulcan, the Anarch—only to puncture every pose with irony.

This revised and expanded second edition triples the uncollected work from the first edition and restores a neglected American voice to its proper amplitude. It adds a new index of 1,000+ entries, substantially expanded paratexts, and poems translated during the author’s lifetime (French, Romanian), alongside his previously published works: The Shadow-Eater, Anathema! Litanies of Negation, and Black Suns.

Witness a writer who stood with—and against—his age: in anarchist journals (Revolt, L’En Dehors) and mainstream venues (The New York Sun, Cosmopolitan), in dialogue with Nietzsche and Stirner, and recognized by peers such as Eugene O’Neill and Don Marquis. From apocalyptic mockery to cosmic despair, DeCasseres is a bridge between Old-World decadence and New-World spectacle—between prayer and blasphemy, satire and metaphysics.

Edited and introduced by Kevin I. Slaughter.