Ironist, Critic, Poet, Nietzschean, Anarch. Friend of H.L. Mencken, Charles Fort, Jack London and relative of Baruch Spinoza. Published in periodicals ranging from the radical anarchist Liberty, to the mainstream Life, his work is now mostly lost and forgotten save a mention every decade or so by scholars or writers who have stumbled across him.
This volume contains the known poetry of Benjamin DeCasseres (1873-1945) outside of his "ANATHEMA Litanies of Negation" and the few poems written in tribute to his brother Walter, contained in "The Sublime Boy." 129 poems in verse and prose, collected from two published volumes ("The Shadow-Eater" and "Black Suns") and culled from dozens of periodicals over the first half of the 20th century.

"I wrote "The Philosophy of Disenchantment," which is, I think, the gloomiest and worst book ever published. Out of sheer laziness, I then produced a history of atheism, "The Anatomy of Negation," which has been honored by international dislike. Need I state that of all my children it is the one that I prefer?" -Edgar Saltus
"Returning to an estimate of Saltus, let us sum up by saying we have in him a temperament saturated with pessimism which expresses itself by the beautiful decoration of sinister themes. To see grandeurs in vast horrors is the last thing a commonplace person can do. Neither can commonplace persons accumulate effortlessly a legend about themselves. This Edgar Saltus has done... "In The Philosophy of Disenchantment" and "The Anatomy of Negation" he has written two compact readable and scholarly resumes of pessimism and of skepticism-perhaps the best handbooks ever published on these subjects" -Broom, Vol. 2
The Philosophy of Disenchantment.
"Mr. Saltus is a scientific pessimist, as witty, as bitter, as satirical, as interesting and as insolent to humanity in general as are his great teachers, Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. there is a prodigious and prodigal display of genius in his work that is a history of antitheism from Kapila to Leconte de Lisle." -Worcester Spy
The Anatomy of Negation.
"A whole library of pessimism compressed into one small volume by a writer whose understanding of the value of words amounts almost to genius." -Chicago Herald
"The work is remarkable in every way and its originality and power will compel for it more than an ephemeral existence, for independently of the force with which it deals with its theme its literary merits are of a high order, and its reflections are those of a bold, brilliant and able thinker." -Boston Saturday Review

A long-form poem of negation and egoism, of scorn and cynical delight.
Included is a URL for a free full audiobook read by Kevin I. Slaughter.
Benjamin DeCasseres (is) the Pontius Pilate of America.
-H.L. Mencken
A passionate, erratic poet... strives to shake the foundation of the world.
-The Saturday Review of Literature
He occupies a niche that is all his own and asks space to stand for no other man .
-The Nation
DeCasseres is the most fiery and independent writer that I know of.
-Remy de Gourmont
There is but one Benjamin DeCasseres. And he is perhaps the one living wonder of the literary world. It is fortunate that such an one must be born, that he cannot be made; especially that he cannot be imitated, for if every one wrote like DeCasseres readers would go mad. That he can keep in any semblance of thought-order such whirls of words is something to marvel at. Yet to read him once, twice, is to experience the greatest mental exhilaration.
-New York Times