{"id":5046,"date":"2023-05-20T11:28:23","date_gmt":"2023-05-20T15:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/?p=5046"},"modified":"2024-10-09T11:19:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-09T15:19:41","slug":"robinson-jeffers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/?p=5046","title":{"rendered":"Robinson Jeffers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet who celebrated the beauty of California\u2019s coast. In 1914 he and his wife Una settled in Carmel. In 1919 Jeffers and his family moved into Tor House, a home that he and a stone-mason had built on Carmel Point using rocks from the shore. From 1920 to 1924 he built by himself the adjacent Hawk Tower. Jeffers became famous soon after the publication of Tamar and Other Poems<\/em> in 1924. This book and those that followed included both long narratives and shorter lyrics. His epics were bloody and tragic; his verse was free and passionate. Underlying his poems was an austere philosophy of \u201cinhumanism.\u201d This compared the transience of humanity to the persistence of the natural world, and proposed that we should detach ourselves from the passions of mankind and simply celebrate the beauty of the universe. Over the next decade, Jeffers published extensively and in 1932 his photograph graced the cover of Time<\/em>. After World War II, his outrage at the death and destruction that occurred during the war and the severity of his inhumanist philosophy led to controversy and obscurity. In more recent years, the environmental movement has found inspiration in his love of the natural world and his anger about how humanity has despoiled it.  <\/p>\n

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Early Life<\/strong><\/p>\n

John Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister and a Professor of Ancient Languages at the Western Theological Seminary. It was his father\u2019s second marriage, and his son\u2019s middle name, which he preferred, was in honor of the first wife, who had died five years earlier. Robinson Jeffers attended private schools in Pittsburgh, and then in Germany and Switzerland. He was a bright student and by the time he was 16 he was fluent in Latin, Greek, French and German. In 1903, his father turned 65 years old and retired to live in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

After graduating from Occidental College in 1905, Jeffers was unsure of what he wanted to do.. He studied languages at the University of Southern California for a year, but then switched to Medicine. After 3 years, he decided that he did not wish to be a physician and began studies in Forestry at the University of Seattle. He found the curriculum too business-oriented and quit, returning to Los Angeles in 1910. <\/p>\n

While at the University of Southern California in 1906, Jeffers met Una Call Kuster (1884-1950) who was also studying languages (Greenan, 1988). At the age of 18 years, she had married Edward Kuster, a rich lawyer and socialite, but wished to complete her education before having a family. Over the years Robinson and Una become fast friends and then passionate lovers. By 1910, their affair became widely known, and divorce proceedings were initiated. These events may have contributed to Jeffers\u2019s moving to Seattle to study forestry. The following illustration shows photographs from 1911 (adapted from Karman, 1913).<\/p>\n

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After the divorce was finalized in 1913, Robinson and Una were married. Their first two years together were marked by grief. A daughter was born in early 1914 but only lived a day. The couple then moved to Carmel, a small village just south of the Monterey peninsula, to be alone together. Then Robinson\u2019s father died in December, 1914.<\/p>\n

In 1912, Jeffers had published at his own expense a book of poems \u2013 Flagons and Apples<\/em>. Of the 500 copies printed, 480 were remaindered and sold to a second-hand bookstore. Now in Carmel, inspired by the Big Sur country just south of the village, Jeffers put together a new book of poems \u2013 The Californians<\/em> \u2013 that was published by Macmillan in 1916. This book contained poems of many forms and lengths, most using classical rhythms and rhyme-schemes.<\/p>\n

Twin boys \u2013 Garth and Donnan \u2013 were born in 1916, and the Jeffers slowly settled into their life at Carmel. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Jeffers attempted to join the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps but his application was rejected because he was already 30 years old and responsible for a new family. Jeffers attempted to write a long poem about the war but it came to nothing. In 1920 he submitted some new poems to Macmillan, but The Californians<\/em> had not sold well and the publisher rejected his submission (Zaller, 1991).<\/p>\n

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Tor House and Hawk Tower<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1919 Jeffers purchased land out on Carmel Point, a raised area jutting out into the ocean just south of Carmel Beach. Here Jeffers helped a stonemason to build Tor House using the rocks and boulders on the point and the adjacent beach. The name comes from the Gaelic word for hill or rocky outcrop. After the house was finished, Jeffers built the adjacent Hawk Tower by himself over several years. The following photographs by Morley Baer show views of the house and tower (from the land and from the sea) as it was in 1964 (Jeffers, Baer & Karman, 2001 At that time everything was still open to the sea; now other houses encroach upon the site.<\/p>\n

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Working on the house and the tower freed up Jeffers\u2019s mind and released his creative impulses. Jeffers stopped using rhyme, and decided to write with natural rhythms in the style of Walt Whitman. Line length became a structuring device for his new poems, which often used alternating long and short lines (Hymes, 1991). The long lines have a grandeur but make the poems difficult to print upon either page or screen. In the books he was to publish in this style, the longer lines are broken in two. For this posting some of the poems will be printed in a smaller font than the rest of the text. These new characteristics are present his poem about Tor House <\/em>(published in 1928):<\/p>\n

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon. (CP I, 408)<\/p>\n

(The references for this and for subsequent poems in this posting are to Jeffers\u2019s Collected Poems<\/em> edited by Tim Hunt).<\/p>\n

Tamar<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffers\u2019s first collection of poems after moving to Tor House \u2013 Tamar and Other Poems<\/em> (1924), published at his own expense \u2013 was written in his new free verse. The epic poem Tamar<\/em> tells the tragedy of a family living at Point Lobos just south of Carmel. The tale has biblical echoes in the stories of Tamar who seduced her father-in-law Judah (Genesis <\/em>38), and of her namesake Tamar, the daughter of King David, who was raped by her step-brother Amnon (2 Samuel<\/em> 13). The following is a summary of Jeffers\u2019s poem (from Karman, 2015, pp 55-56);<\/p>\n

Tamar<\/em> \u2026 tells the story of the doomed Cauldwells who live in an isolated home on Point Lobos, south of Carmel. The head of the house is David Cauldwell, an old, broken-down man who frequently quotes the Bible. Two children, a son named Lee and a daughter Tamar, live with him, along with his demented sister Jinny, and Stella Moreland, the sister of his dead wife Lily. The action of the story, set around the time of America\u2019s entry into World War I, concerns Tamar\u2019s incestuous relationship with her brother, an ensuing pregnancy, and her seduction of an unloved suitor to snare a respectable father for the child. Through her Aunt Stella, a medium for the dead, Tamar learns that her father had an incestuous relationship with his sister Helen, which makes her behavior seem more like the simple repetition of a family pattern instead of the singular act of a bounds-breaking free spirit. In the process of coming to terms with this knowledge, Tamar dances naked in a trance-induced frenzy on the seashore, where she is violated by the ghosts of Indians who once lived on Point Lobos, and where she speaks with the ghost of her Aunt Helen, her father\u2019s sister-lover. As Tamar\u2019s mind sickens, she thinks of ways to destroy her family, especially after learning that her brother, seeking adventure, plans to enlist and leave home. The end comes in a wild conflagration. On the eve of her brother\u2019s departure, with her benighted suitor at hand, Tamar orchestrates an explosion of jealous rage. As her brother pulls a knife and stabs her suitor, Tamar\u2019s Aunt Jinny sets the house on fire. Floors break, walls fall, and everyone perishes in the flames.<\/p>\n

Jeffers tells his convoluted story of incest and murder in an epic style, and intersperses the events with quieter descriptions of the California Coast. This combination of the lurid and the lyrical makes for uneasy reading. Not a poem for the faint of heart, it was the first of many long narratives that Jeffers was to write over the next decades.<\/p>\n

The book also contains many short poems describing the beauty of the California Coast, such as Divinely Superfluous Beauty<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean\u2026
Divinely superfluous beauty
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
And hills tower, waves fall.
The incredible beauty of joy
Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too
Be joined, there is not a maiden
Burns and thirsts for love
More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings
Weave like a web in the air
Divinely superfluous beauty.(CP I, 4)<\/p>\n

Jeffers also began to consider the transience of humanity in a universe that lasts for ever in such poems as To the Stone-Cutters <\/em>(recorded by Jeffers in 1941):<\/p>\n

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. (CP I, 5)<\/p>\nhttps:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/To-The-Stone-Cutters-by-Robinson-Jeffers.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

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Big Sur<\/strong><\/p>\n

The California coast south of Carmel and north of San Simeon is known as the Big Sur \u2013 a name deriving from the Spanish el sur grande<\/em> (the big south), which is how the Spanish settlers on the Monterey Peninsula referred to the region. Here the Santa Lucia mountains rise directly from the sea. Edward Weston (1886-1958) took many striking photographs of this coastline, and in 1938 moved his studio to Carmel. Below are Weston\u2019s photographs from 1929 and 1938.<\/p>\n

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The poetry of Robinson Jeffers celebrated the beauty of Big Sur. The following is a poem about Garapata Beach where Soberanes (or Sovranes) Creek empties into the Pacific \u2013 The Place for No Story <\/em>(1932). When introducing the poem in a reading in 1941 Jeffers remarked about the title:<\/p>\n

These eleven lines are called \u201cThe Place for No Story,\u201d because the coast here, its pure and simple grandeur, seemed to me too beautiful to be the scene of any narrative of mine. (Jeffers, 1956)<\/p>\n

The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land\u2019s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. (CP II, 157)<\/p>\n

The following it is a 1964 photograph of the beach by Morley Baer (Jeffers, Baer & Karman, 2001). Barely visible in the photograph are hawks, haunting the sky above the further slopes:<\/p>\n

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The poem is \u201can evocation of the sublime\u201d (Zaller, 2012, p 171). Yet it differs from Wordsworth\u2019s sublime. It is not the participation of the individual human consciousness in something universal:<\/p>\n

                    \u2026a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey<\/em>, 1798)<\/p>\n

For Jeffers, the sublime is totally independent of any human interaction. It is something to be wondered at but not participated in.<\/p>\n

Fame <\/strong><\/p>\n

After Tamar<\/em>, Jeffers became very successful, publishing a book every year or two. Like Tamar, these books contained both long narratives and short lyrics. His poetic style \u2013 the long lines and the free rhythms \u2013 did not change. The narrative poems continued to be full of sex and violence \u2013 like penny-dreadfuls updated to the 20th<\/sup> Century and translated into poetry. Jeffers, however, had tapped some current in the American soul.<\/p>\n

The shorter poems continued to be more approachable. The following is Hawk and Rock<\/em> (1935). Robert Hass (1987) was to use this as the title poem for a later collection of Jeffers\u2019s shorter lyrics.<\/p>\n

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the sea-wind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud. (CP II, 416)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The poem proclaims Jeffers outlook on life \u2013 a combination of fierce consciousness and disinterestedness, bright power and dark peace. The following shows the final lines in Jeffers\u2019s handwriting (from an inscription in a book gifted to a friend).<\/p>\n

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Jeffers\u2019s photograph made the cover of Time<\/em> in 1932. (It was not until 1950 that the magazine awarded a cover portrait to either Robert Frost or T. S. Eliot.) In 1938, Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers<\/em>, a volume of over 600 pages.  The following are photographs of Jeffers taken by Edward Weston during the height of his fame \u2013 the middle image is from the cover of Time<\/em>:<\/p>\n

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Inhumanism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffers had received a modern scientific education and understood the import of evolutionary theory and recent findings in astronomy upon our place in the world and in time. He realized that the human species might develop further, but would ultimately become extinct, the universe then continuing to exist without any further contribution from mankind. Nevertheless, he gloried in the heart-breaking beauty of the natural world. He described this \u201creligious feeling\u201d in his 1941 talk to the Library of Congress (Jeffers, 1956, pp 23-24):<\/p>\n

It is the feeling \u2026 I will say the certitude \u2026 that the world, the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be love and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it. <\/p>\n

But these moments are evanescent. The beauty of the world will outlast us. The following are the lines that end his 1926 poem Credo<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it. (CP I, 239)<\/span><\/p>\n

Jeffers view of beauty was that it was part of nature and would outlast the perceiver. An opposing view is that beauty is in the mind, and that human beings have evolved to find the world they live in beautiful. Such a development facilitates human survival: if we cherish the world, we will reap its bounty. <\/p>\n

Jeffers\u2019s philosophy was more specifically described in the preface to his 1947 book The Double Axe<\/em> (the original version of which is included in his 2001 Selected Poetry<\/em> edited by Tim Hunt):<\/p>\n

It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies has realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.<\/p>\n

Jeffers contrasted his ideas to Renaissance Humanism, which, though he preferred it to the preceding Scholastic Theology, he felt improperly placed Man at the center of the universe. The Renaissance took to heart wisdom of philosophers such as Protagoras of Abdera who proposed that \u201cMan is the measure of all things\u201d and doubted the existence of the gods: \u201cConcerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.\u201d (Bonazzi, 2020). Renaissance philosophers like Pico della Mirandola focussed on the man rather than on God. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man<\/em>, he proclaimed that \u201cThere is nothing to be seen more wonderful than Man\u201d (Forbes, 1942).<\/p>\n

Jeffers called his philosophy \u201cinhumanism\u201d to distinguish it from the humanism of the Renaissance (Carpenter, 1981). As Nafis-Sahely (2016) has remarked, the philosophy \u201cmight have fared better under a different name.\u201d Perhaps, for example, \u201cnaturalism.\u201d The first meaning suggested by the word \u201cinhumanism\u201d is \u201cbrutality.\u201d Jeffers\u2019s inhumanism is an austere and detached view of the world. It has many similarities to stoicism (Lioi, 2025): we live our life as best we can; we pass away and the world persists. In his 1941 talk, Jeffers (1956, p 28) related his inhumanism to the main tenets of Christianity:<\/p>\n

It seems to me, analogously, that the whole human race spends too much emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human things, let him regard them objectively, as a small part of the great music. Certainly humanity has claims, on all of us; we can best fulfill them by keeping our emotional sanity; and this by seeing beyond and around the human race. This is far from humanism; but it is, in fact, the Christian attitude: \u2026 to love God with all one’s heart and soul, and one’s neighbor as one’s self \u2014 as much as that, but as little as that. <\/p>\n

Jeffers was enthusiastic in his love of nature, but far more detached in his love of neighbor. Although he wrote in the style of Walt Whitman, he lacked that poet\u2019s intense love of his fellow man.<\/p>\n

One of the clearest poetic descriptions of inhumanism is in final section of the late poem De Rerum Virtute<\/em> or (On the Nature of Virtue) (1954, discussed extensively by Chapman, 2002):<\/p>\n

One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;
The immense beauty of the world, not the human world.
Look\u2014and without imagination, desire nor dream\u2014directly
At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful?
These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks
Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean?
Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore,
With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions
Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind,
And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream\u2014
But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken
Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest,
Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice\u2014is the earth not beautiful?
Nor the great skies over the earth?
The beauty of things means virtue and value in them.
It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly.
It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman
Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound,
Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it. (CP III, 403)<\/p>\n

The Double Axe<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffers was thoroughly dismayed by World War II and believed that the United States should never have entered the fighting. His pacifism was accentuated by the fact that his son Garth was serving in the US forces. Donnan had been excused because of a heart murmur. Jeffers could not see any difference between the sides \u2013 he thought that Churchill and Roosevelt were as guilty as Hitler and Mussolini.<\/p>\n

In 1948 Jeffers published his first collection of poems since Pearl Harbor \u2013 The Double Axe<\/em>. The The title poem was composed of two parts: The<\/em> Love and the Hate<\/em> and The Inhumanist. <\/em>In the first part a young soldier killed in the Pacific Campaign wills his decaying body to return home to the family ranch in the Big Sur and confront his father:<\/p>\n

                                     Did you
And your old buddies decide what the war’s about?
I came to ask. You were all for it, you know;
And keeping safe away from it, so to speak, maybe you see
Reasons that we who only die in it can’t, (CP III, 222)<\/p>\n

The second part of the poem occurs years later on the same Big Sur ranch. Its caretaker (and possessor of the double-bit axe) looks after the homestead as various refugees from a nuclear war arrive. After a snowfall the old man addresses his axe to repudiate the humanism of the Renaissance:<\/p>\n

Man is no measure of anything. Truly it is yours to hack, snow’s to be white, mine to admire;
Each cat mind her own kitten: that is our morals. But wait till the moon comes up the snow-tops,
And you’ll sing Holy. (CP III, 264)<\/span><\/p>\n

Jeffers\u2019s politics and philosophy did not appeal to a people that considered the war they had just won as righteous. The publisher convinced Jeffers to withdraw some of his most virulent anti-war poems (Shebl, 1976) and added a disclaimer to the book in a \u201cPublisher\u2019s Note\u201d:<\/p>\n

Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume. <\/p>\n

The reviews were scathing. From then on, Jeffers was no longer an acclaimed poet. He lived out the rest of his life in Carmel in relative obscurity. He continued to publish occasionally but critics disparaged his work even while admitting its importantance. The following is from a review of his posthumously published last poems:<\/p>\n

Surely he provides us with plenty to carp about: his oracular moralizing, his cruel and thoroughly repellent sexuality, his dreadful lapses of taste when he seems simply to throw back his head and howl, his slovenly diction, the eternal sameness of his themes, the amorphous sprawl of his poems on the page. The sheer power and drama of some of Jeffers’ writing, however, still carries the day despite everything, and this is not so much because of the presence of the Truth that Jeffers believes he has got hold of but because of what might be called the embodiment of that Truth: Jeffers’ gorgeous panorama of big imagery, his galaxies, suns, seas, cliffs, continents, mountains, rivers, flocks of birds, gigantic schools of fish, and so on. His Truth is hard to swallow try looking at your children and drawing comfort from Jeffers’ “inhumanism”\u2014but one cannot shake off Jeffers’ vision as one can the carefully prepared surprises of many of the neatly packaged stanzas we call “good poems”; it is too deeply disturbing and too powerfully stated. (Dickey, 1964).<\/p>\n

In the late 60s the escalation of the Vietnam War led to the involvement and death of US troops. Jeffers\u2019s passionate pacificism became more understandable, and his poetry underwent some rehabilitation and republication (Nolte, 1978).<\/p>\n

The Environmental Movement<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another important development affecting the reputation of Robinson Jeffers was the birth of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring<\/em> in 1962. As well as pointing out the severe problems that result from our misuse of the environment, the movement also published books showing the beauty of unspoiled nature. A major example of this was the book Not Man Apart<\/em> (Adams et al, 1964) which combined photographs of the Big Sur Coast with lines from Robinson Jeffers.<\/p>\n

Karman (2015) remarks about Jeffers attitude to man\u2019s place in nature:<\/p>\n

Jeffers\u2019 experience of deep time added a vatic amplitude to his verse, and a sharp moral edge. He spoke repeatedly about the destruction of Earth\u2019s environment, warning, shrilly at times, of the effects of overpopulation, pollution, and the exploitation of natural resources. <\/p>\n

Quigley (2002) places Jeffers in a direct line between Thoreau (1817-1862) and later authors such as Edward Abbey (1927-1989) and Gary Snyder (1930- ) in the development of modern environmentalism. Of these writers, Jeffers was the most critical of how man has misused the world, and perhaps the most pessimistic. However, Abbey, Snyder and other writers have taken to heart his criticisms and tried to formulate new and better ways for man and nature to interact. Wyatt (1986) has written of the affinity between Jeffers and Snyder, both of whom spent much time building homes to fit in with the natural world. John Elder (1985) discussed Jeffers and nature in the context of how nature and humanity must interact \u2013 a process that he terms \u201cculture:\u201d<\/p>\n

In learning to find equivalence between mountains, grass, and man, we gain the composure of a larger design. It is not a fixed, symmetrical rose, like Dante’s covering order, but rather a process of tidal exchange, of decay and renewal. Only as we learn to see it in a natural order beyond man’s civilized system may the human waste-land be redeemed and the individual made whole. Conversely, unless the city is restored and human life brought back into physical and spiritual balance, the wilderness beloved of fierce solitaries like Jeffers will inevitably be destroyed. The circuit of mutual dependence between nature and civilization defines my understanding of the word culture: it is a process rather than a product, something that grows rather than being manufactured. And only in poetry is culture fully realized.<\/p><\/p>\n

In Retrospect<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffers wrote some powerful but difficult longer poems and some fine shorter lyrics. I would like to end the posting with one of his early poems \u2013 The Excesses of God<\/em> (1924) \u2013 together with the woodcut by Mallette Dean that accompanies the poem in his 1956 book:<\/p>\n

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.(CP I, 4)<\/p>\n

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Resources<\/strong><\/p>\n

The website of the Robinson Jeffers Association<\/a> provides links to many different resources about the poet, including an archive of most of the issues of the journal Jeffers Studies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/strong><\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Adams, A., Jeffers, R., & Brower, D. (1965). Not man apart:<\/em> Lines from Robinson Jeffers with photographs of the Big Sur Coast.<\/em> Sierra Club.<\/p>\n

Bonazzi, M. (2020). Protagoras<\/a>. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.<\/p>\n

Carpenter, F. I. (1981). The inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers. Western American Literature<\/em>, 16(1), 19-25<\/p>\n

Chapman, S. (2002). De Rerum Virtute: <\/em>a critical anatomy. Jeffers Studies<\/em>, 6(4), 22-35.<\/p>\n

Dickey, J. (1964). Review of The Beginning and the End and Other Poems<\/em>. Poetry, 103(5), 316-324.<\/p>\n

Elder, J. (1985). Imagining the Earth: poetry and the vision of nature<\/em>. University of Illinois Press.<\/p>\n

Forbes, E. L. (1942). Of the Dignity of Man: Oration of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Count of Concordia. Journal of the History of Ideas<\/em>, 3(3), 347-354. <\/p>\n

Greenan, E. (1998). Of Una Jeffers<\/em>. Story Line Press.<\/p>\n

Hass, R. (1987). Robinson Jeffers: the poetry and the life. The American Poetry Review<\/em>. 16(6), 33-41. (a reprint of the introduction to Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Hymes, D. (1991). Jeffers\u2019 artistry of line. In Zaller, R. (Ed.) Centennial essays for Robinson Jeffers<\/em>. (pp. 226-267). University of Delaware Press.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, R. (1938). The selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers.<\/em> Random House.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, R. (1956). Themes in my poems<\/em>. Book Club of California.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, R. (Ed. Hunt, T., 2001). The selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers<\/em>. Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, R. (Ed. Hunt, T., 1988-2002). The collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers<\/em>. (5 volumes). Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, R. (Ed. Karman, J., 2009-2015). The collected letters of Robinson Jeffers: with selected letters of Una Jeffers<\/em>. (3 volumes) Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

Jeffers, R., Baer, M., & Karman, J. (2001). Stones of the Sur<\/em>. Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

Karman, J. (2015). Robinson Jeffers: poet and prophet<\/em>. Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

Lioi, A. (2016). Knocking our heads to pieces against the night: going cosmic with Robinson Jeffers. In Tangney, S. (Ed.) The wild that attracts us: new critical essays on Robinson Jeffers<\/em>. (pp 117-140). University of New Mexico Press.<\/p>\n

Nafis-Sahely, A. (2016). If you believe that you\u2019ll believe anything \u2013 Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet. Wild Court<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nolte, W. H. (1978). Robinson Jeffers redivivus. The Georgia Review<\/em>, 32<\/em>(2), 429-434.<\/p>\n

Quigley, P. (2002) Carrying the weight: Jeffers\u2019s Role in preparing the way for ecocriticism. Jeffers Studies<\/em>, 6(4), 46-68.<\/p>\n

Shebl, J. M. (1976). In this wild water: the suppressed poems of Robinson Jeffers<\/em>. Ward Ritchie Press.<\/p>\n

Wyatt, D. (1986). Jeffers, Snyder, and the ended world. In The Fall into Eden<\/em>. (pp. 174\u2013205). Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Zaller, R. (1991). Robinson Jeffers, American poetry and a thousand years. In Zaller, R. (Ed.) Centennial essays for Robinson Jeffers<\/em>. (pp. 29-43). University of Delaware Press.<\/p>\n

Zaller, R. (2012). Robinson Jeffers and the American sublime<\/em>. Stanford University Press.<\/p>\n

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Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet who celebrated the beauty of California\u2019s coast. In 1914 he and his wife Una settled in Carmel. In 1919 Jeffers and his family moved into Tor House, a home that he and a stone-mason had built on Carmel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":355,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,5,14,9],"tags":[659,661,669,660,663,662,668,665,667,664,666],"class_list":["post-5046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature","category-poetry","category-politics","category-religion","tag-big-sur","tag-carmel","tag-edward-weston","tag-environmentalism","tag-humanism","tag-inhumanism","tag-no-man-apart","tag-pacifism","tag-silent-spring","tag-tamar","tag-una-jeffers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5046"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6240,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5046\/revisions\/6240"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creatureandcreator.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}