all of his ideas were themselves amazing things. It’s just that Lovecraft lacked the capability to do anything useful with them himself. To use a perhaps wobbly metaphor, it’s as if Lovecraft wrote piles and piles of source code, but never thought to compile it into a beautiful and functional piece of software. So instead, the world was greeted with pages of source code, which, the world not being made up solely of programmers, did not read smoothly, did not look pretty, and was not interesting. The remarkable thing is all the people who have later come along and compiled that source code of ideas into amazing works of art.