Poetry and the Gods that Lovecraft and Winifred Jackson co-wrote with a Greek mythology basis. What Anna Helen Crofts contributed to "Poetry and the Gods" is unknown. Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi reports that she "appeared sporadically in the amateur press, and may have been introduced to [Lovecraft] by Winifred Jackson." Lovecraft's surviving letters do not mention "Poetry and the Gods". In his 1955 essay on the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft scholar George Wetzel compares the messenger god Hermes in "Poetry and the Gods" with Nyarlathotep, the "messenger of Azathoth". Wetzel considers the dream communication used by Hermes to be "the same psychic device used
Greek sea gods gods in the "Iliad", while in the seventh century BC the Spartan poet Alcman made the sea-nymph Thetis a demiurge-figure. Orpheus's song in Book I of the "Argonautica" hymns the sea-nymph Eurynome as first queen of the gods, as wife of the ocean-born giant Ophion. The pre-Socratic cosmogony of Thales, who made water the first element, may be seen as a natural outgrowth of this poetic thinking. The primacy of aquatic gods is reminiscent of, and may even have been influenced by, ancient Near Eastern mythology - where Tiamat (salt water) and Apsu (fresh water) are the first gods of