1963 • Vintage Books
128 pages / 0394702956 (paperback)
I can vaguely recall my first brush with Robinson Jeffers on the liberal arts floor of our college's library. While browsing shelves of twentieth-century American authors, 'Jeffers' leaped out at me after hearing his name mentioned in passing by my English teachers. Yet, his work never appeared in class or on our syllabi. What was the big secret?
That is a question to be asked for university professors who rarely teach Jeffers and book publishers such as W.W. Norton, who went as far as to omit his work from editions of their American literature anthology. Although his reputation took a substantial beating after the end of World War II, there was a point during the 1920s when critics such as T.S. Eliot and Mark Van Doren regarded Jeffers as the best living American poet of any age group. So great was the reception to poems such as Tamar and Roan Stallion that comparisons were made to the Greek epics and Shakespeare.Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to a Presbyterian theologian in 1887. His experience with languages and letters dated practically from birth, as he mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at an early age and attended boarding schools in Europe where he learned French and German. Jeffers is what would now be classified as an absolute genius, studying extensively in literature, biology, medicine, and forest science. His legacy rests in several collections of verse, which still remain in obscurity compared to fellow American writers like Eliot, Pound, Moore, and Stevens.
The legacy of Jeffers was damaged by unorthodox political views that availed themselves in the 1940s, when he published The Double Axe and Other Poems through Random House. Jeffers cemented his position as an isolationist who was against U.S. intervention in either of the two World Wars. Until recently, the survival of his work was ensured not by universities but an intense readership who have admired his philosophy and style. Environmentalists have also hitched their wagon to Jeffers's overarching awareness of the natural world, which has somehow converted his esteem to one as an eco-poet. His reputation has mended to a degree: his image reached a U.S. postage stamp in 1973 and he is now receiving increased attention from literary bloggers. Jeffers's work, however, is still far from gaining the respect it deserves.
Jeffers's canon is extensive; his work dates from the 1910s to the 60s, features poems of epic length (such as Cawdor and The Women at Point Sur), and has extraordinary breadth of thought and meaning. He began as a generalizer of the human condition through his philosophy of Inhumanism - an admiration for the natural world combined with Schopenhauerian pessimism that looks to curtail the follies of human passion. As war and international politics escalated through the century, his verse took on a more contemporary stance, even bringing world leaders such as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Churchill to task. The Selected Poems first released by Vintage Books in 1963 - one year after Jeffers's death - looks to simplify the reading experience by offering several of his best-known, shorter works from key points in American history.
The Vintage edition includes such groundbreakers as 'Shine, Perishing Republic,' 'Hurt Hawks,' 'The Purse-Seine,' 'Contemplation of the Sword,' and his elegy 'The Deer Lay Down Their Bones.' One of Jeffers's longer poems, Roan Stallion, is also included to profile his frequently epic scope. Most of the poems chosen are defined by his long, sweeping lines that were certainly influenced by writings such as the Odyssey and Aeneid. Their raw pronouncements have a flow and motion not unlike the Pacific tide that constantly struck cliffs outside his home in the Carmel Valley.
Jeffers's verse is technically solid. His only apparent weaknesses are using rhyme loosely in the few cases where he chooses to do so and occasionally lax language in his more introspective poems, which try to capture actual thought processes. When in top form, Jeffers's extensive lines, which intentionally diffuse the artificialities of meter, show an enormous control and precision. His statements are also free of ambiguity and made with an authority that leaves little room for dispute.
While Jeffers deserves a much larger readership, the brute force of his subject matter will probably make it impossible for him to be fully accepted by the literary community. Criticisms of the American mindset are still repellant to many in this country (writers such as Stanley Kunitz and Babette Deutsch expressed deep misgivings over Jeffers's politics) and his poems on nature and epic themes are laced with blood and agony: animal violence (in works like 'Orca'), incest (in Tamar), and religious hysteria (The Women at Point Sur) are just three of his topics that yet lend to artistic brilliance.
Even with this unpleasantness, Jeffers's verse offers a window to the natural world, a view that we could perhaps have made for ourselves but were too busy or not resolute enough to find. His portrayals of California and travel places such as the British Isles are breathtaking and expansive. He accounts for these surroundings with a marvelous acuity and scenes come alive on the page. Though it would leave him far more one-dimensional, Jeffers's reputation could have been secured as a poet of nature alone.
Jeffers, at any rate, wrote quite begrudgingly for an audience. He admitted his verse as more of a solitary liniment for his being than an open pronunciation. While he attempted to influence others with his concept of Inhumanism, his writings indicate an overwhelming skepticism towards the improvement of mankind. By the late 1940s, he began to consider humanity as a complete disaster, hell-bent on its own destruction. He was unable to reconcile our existence with the havoc we've created for other forms of life on Earth, nor saw a long-term answer to these problems with mankind consumed by its self-absorption.
After tearing through a few more wars and political masquerades since his death in 1962 ("They are warming up the old horrors," he wrote in 'The Soul's Desert'), his social implications seem to ring true more than ever. The same can be said about his commitment to the ecosphere, which he pondered at a time when environmental issues were barely a topic of discussion. In an odd sense, Jeffers's trains of thought, while condemned as antihuman, quasi-fascist, and pretentious, were about fifty years ahead of their time. Thoughtful people have a tendency to do these things.
