H. P. Lovecraft referred to Park Barnitz as “a vivid decadent of the fin de siècle period who modelled his verse on Baudelaire & killed himself soon after graduation from Harvard.” His one and only volume, The Book of Jade (1901), has become a legend in the realm of weird poetry, its technical precision and its relentless obsession with death, horror, madness, and pessimism making it a choice prize for appreciators of poetic witchery. Park Barnitz was a student of Sanskrit and Asian history and received an A.B. (the equivalent of a modern PhD) from Harvard in 1898. He was the youngest person ever admitted to Harvard's American Oriental Society.