Volume 1, Number 3

Courtesy in the Universe: Jeffers, Santayana and the "Adult Habit of Thought"
by David Copland Morris

1.   Jeffers claims for his self-styled and controversial "inhumanist" perspective a mature superiority to the problematic humanism, or human chauvinism, which he sees dominating modern life: "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" (DA 172). In defining his notion of "inhumanism," Jeffers says: "It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and abilities are as insignificant as our happiness" (DA 172). Jeffers claims for this view the authority of adulthood, and for anyone who adopts the prophetic stance--as Jeffers surely did throughout his whole career--the issue of authority is crucial.

2.   But Helen Vendler, a central pillar of the critical establishment as poetry editor at The New Yorker and holder of an endowed chair at Harvard, has claimed that Jeffers suffers precisely from a lack of authority, that he did not have a courageous or mature mind: "What, then, is it that fails to compel acquiescence to Jeffers' verse? My short answer would be 'his moral timidity'" (91). In Vendler's view, Jeffers resisted the "introspection" required of the major poet, nor did he conduct a proper "investigation into his own private terrors" (94-5). She sees Jeffers' own condemnation of the modern preoccupation with such investigations as cowardly avoidance; she ridicules his criticism of "introversion" (she is the one who puts this word in quotes) as self-serving blindness (95).

3.   Significantly, she implies that what Jeffers most lacked is what he himself saw as his major achievement: the attainment of an adult habit of thought. In reviewing the development of his poetic vision, she asserts: "Not much. . .changed at the center. This permanent arrest at the point of youthful self-discovery is the central fact to be confronted by any commentator on Jeffers" (92). The fact that Jeffers did not reach his mature world-view and style until he was in his thirties makes Vendler's claim of youthful discovery a rather odd one. But let her characterization stand as evidence of her challenge to Jeffers' implied claim of his own exceptional maturity of outlook.

4.   Vendler's attack on Jeffers is a very important one for it comes in a review of Robert Hass's edition of selected Jeffers poems called Rock and Hawk. Haas is a prominent contemporary poet and critic who exhibits a meticulous writing style in both poetry and prose. Included in his edition was a judicious, carefully argued defense of Jeffers' work. His opinion was not one Vendler could brush aside, and with great seriousness and vehemence she set about to abort any revival of Jeffers' reputation that Haas's efforts might inspire. Her criticisms of Jeffers often take a surprisingly personal, and even nasty, turn:

A friend who was present at the reading Jeffers gave at Harvard in 1941 recalls that at the reception Jeffers turned to the wall, face averted from the crowd. The poet's attitude was at that time interpreted as hauteur; it could equally well be interpreted as the panicky ill-ease of a friendless, freakish boy even though he was past fifty. (93)

She never considers a third explanation: Jeffers was neither haughty nor panicky, he was genuinely indifferent, possibly even bored. Perhaps just tired. To Vendler, being the guest of honor at a Harvard reception may seem the summit of life. To Jeffers, it was probably a tedious social obligation following a poetry reading on a tour that he did at least partly for the money, money needed to redeem his Tor House property from the threat of a staggering Carmel sewer-line assessment. The tour also kept him away from his much-loved home in California at a time in his life when he was reluctant to travel.

5.   It is representative of the tenor of Vendler's whole article that in the end she evaluates Jeffers using criteria that might best be most appropriate to a sorority or fraternity rush. And indeed, speaking as she does from the center of the American literary establishment, she may easily be seen as wishing to blackball someone she doesn't find congenial (and doesn't really understand). She banishes him from proper society, that of the acceptable modernists: "I resist grouping him [Jeffers] not only with his greater contemporaries--Eliot and Frost--but even with such lesser contemporaries as Moore and Williams" (91).

6.   Immoderate and vituperative as Vendler's attack may be, it cannot be ignored. Her undeniable prominence in the critical establishment makes her an influential arbiter of Jeffers' reputation. And the venue in which she published her judgments, a lengthy, featured book review in The New Yorker, ensured that they reached the largest possible audience of serious readers of poetry.

7.   What then is the actual status of Jeffers' work? Is it, as she asserts, the product of an immature and timid mind, or is it the breakthrough to truly adult consciousness that Jeffers claimed it was? The issue turns on the degree of truthfulness and profundity of Jeffers' inhumanist vision. After enumerating several shortcomings that Jeffers exhibits, critic Colin Falck asserts: "His stark vision, nevertheless, if only we can find authentic and not merely defensive ways of exposing ourselves to it, can only be spiritually strengthening" (12). I strongly agree, and my aim here is to describe what one of those authentic ways might be. The primary guiding principle is to make a good-faith effort to look at Jeffers with an open mind, not, as Vendler does, to make the vulgar assumption that his demanding, outward-looking vision is merely a symptom of psychological damage caused by a supposed unhappy childhood. And she should not hurl the charge of moral timidity at Jeffers without considering whether said moral timidity may in fact be found more readily in the narrow modernist presumptions with which she reads the text.

8.   In initially considering Vendler's charges of timidity and immaturity, one could admit that there is a certain quietism to Jeffers' suggestions about the best modes of activity for those who have achieved what he sees as the adult habit of thought: he suggests that "We could take a walk," or that "We could dig our gardens" (DA 173). He goes so far as to say with fine Jeffersian disgust: "We could even be quiet occasionally" (DA 173). But such modest notions run squarely against the grain of almost all of modern culture. Lionel Trilling observed:

 . . . Western culture . . . is committed to the idea of consciousness and activity, of motion and force. With us the basis of spiritual prestige is some form of aggressive action directed outward upon the world, or inward upon ourselves. (116)

Just such a notion seems to underlie Vendler's criticism of Jeffers.

9.   Vendler refers condescendingly to Jeffers' lyrics as his "woodnotes." And she tries to condescend further by saying: "Jeffers, it appears to me, will remain a notable minor poet, the first to give adequate description in verse of the scenery of the California coast" (95). In so saying, she shows the lamentable incomprehension of the humanist concerning what "adequate description" of landscape might mean. As I will try to show, from the standpoint of inhumanism, and of ecology, Jeffers is not minor, but a figure of major importance. Vendler further claims that Jeffers' "moral timidity" and lack of properly modernist introspection leads him to a "self-stalled identity" and a "self-stalled art." This is another way of saying that he is not, in fact, capable of leading us to an adult habit of thought. But it is really she, operating within her modernist blinders and her humanist anthropocentrism, who has ground to a halt far short of the edge of wisdom. She claims:

Jeffers, timid and unballasted among people, felt secured and ballasted by stone, weight, long lines, mass. His bluster. . .needs to be read as the long-maintained armor protecting him against an investigation of his own private terrors. (94)

10.   But this is almost exquisitely wrong. To the contrary, the braggadocio and self-absorption of modern anthropocentric humanism and its art need to be read as the long-maintained armor protecting modern humanity from the investigation of its true place in a world of Darwinian biology, post-Copernican astronomy, and (now) contemporary ecology and environmental science. Jeffers' world-view is neither abject or childish; rather, it is among the most fully mature and courageous that we have.

11.   I would like to support this contention partly by showing that Jeffers has a powerful ally for his inhumanist stance in George Santayana whose style and tone are so dramatically different from Jeffers. Santayana is the most elegant, polished and suave of modern philosophers; he is the most unruffled, and in some sense, the most mature, yet there came to be a strong inhumanist strain in his thought. Santayana (mentor, ironically, of Vendler's favorite, Wallace Stevens) is really in the inhumanist camp. William Everson, in his book Archetype West, was the first to explore the connection between Jeffers and Santayana. Everson saw Santayana as having described, during a 1911 speech in Berkeley, important features of the inhumanist literary archetype of the Pacific region (54-60). Jeffers' work, in Everson's view, later became the apotheosis of this archetype (67). In exploring further the Jeffers-Santayana linkage, I will focus on a different text than that of Santayana's Berkeley address, namely his 1915 book originally entitled Egotism in German Philosophy (and subsequently reprinted as The German Mind. After discussing Santayana, I will examine Jeffers in light of Freud's view of adulthood, for Freud is our most influential figure in constructing adulthood's modern definition. Freud is especially relevant here because his concept of the adult is closely related to Vendler's.

12.   I will argue here, following Jeffers and Santayana, that humanism of the type represented by Vendler is callow in its view of human/nature relations in a way inhumanism is not. Humanism mistakes a part for the whole; it asserts as absolute the primacy of the will, but taking the will as absolute is in fact only a convention. The constricted view of value which humanism provides results from a limited vision--one might say an immature vision. Santayana asserts: "The will is absolute neither in the individual nor in humanity. Nature is not the product of mind, but on the contrary there is an external world, ages prior to any idea of it, which the mind recognizes and feeds upon" (168). And: "The environment in which this will finds itself controls and rewards its various movements, and establishes within it the difference between virtueand vice, wisdom and folly" (167). Furthermore, will, while certainly not equivalent to the entirety of human being, is perhaps not even the most important part of consciousness. Santayana suggests:

Actual and conscious will is a passing phenomenon; it is so little necessary to life that it always disappears when life is at its height. All pure pleasures, including those of seeing and thinking, are without it: they are ingenuous, and terminate in their present object. A philosopher should have learned from Aristotle, if not from his own experience, that at the acme of life we live in the eternal, and that then, as Schopenhauer said, we no longer pry but gaze, and are freed from willing. (120)

What Santayana delineates in the quotations above is an "inhumanist" perspective, quite in line with Jeffers.

13.   Now if the will is not a necessary condition for intensity of life, it can be argued that it is not the central feature of the moral life either: one of the important connotations of the word "humane" (as opposed to "human") is exactly an absence of willing, a refusal to assert oneself inappropriately, a restraint. Santayana says that what causes the restraint, and what makes a person humane, is that "the freedom and exuberance of nature [impress] him more than his own." This notion of a fundamental humility is the essence, ironically, of inhumanism--thus, while inhumanism is not at all incompatible with humaneness, indeed sustains it, humanism may leave too little space for it. It is the inhumanist, after all, who, in Santayana's words, practices "courtesy in the universe":

There is a steady human nature within us, which our moods and passions may wrong but cannot annul. There is no categorical imperative but only the operation of instincts and interests more or less subject to discipline and mutual adjustment. Our whole life is a compromise, an incipient loose harmony between the passions of the soul and the forces of nature, forces which likewise generate and protect the souls of other creatures, endowing them with powers of expression and self- assertion comparable with our own, and with aims no less sweet and worthy in their own eyes; so that the quick and honest mind cannot but practice courtesy in the universe, exercising its will without vehemence or forced assurance, judging with serenity, and in everything discarding the word absolute as the most false and the most odious of words. (168)

14.   The issue can be focused, I believe, if we transpose it to the Freudian terms, mainly those found in Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud seems crucial here because he identifies maturity with ego development and I would claim that at the root of humanism we find Freud's "ego," while at the root of inhumanism we find what he calls the "oceanic feeling." Freud finds the oceanic feeling to be associated with childhood and with arrested development. For purposes of speculation, we can equate link ego with humanism and oceanic feeling with inhumanism, though the fit is not perfect. The ego is also closely related to the will, although again, the fit is not airtight. But the oceanic feeling is a state in which the will is in suspension, a state not unlike what Santayana describes (quoted above) as the "acme of life." Citing the friend who first described to him the oceanic feeling, Freud says, "It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity,' a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded--as it were, 'oceanic'" (11).

15.   Those familiar with Jeffers' work will recognize that something very much like the oceanic feeling underlies the vision in many of his poems. In the narrative poem "The Inhumanist," a character who is an alter-ego of Jeffers contemplates the beauty of the natural world after viewing from a great height a rugged portion of the California landscape:

          Suddenly he knelt,
 &bsnp;and tears ran down the gullied leather
Of his old cheeks. "Dear love. You are so beautiful.
Even this side the stars and below the moon. How can
   you be . . . all this . . . and me also?
Be Human also? The yellow puma, the flighty mourning-
   dove and flecked hawk, yes and the rattlesnake
Are in the nature of things; they are noble and
   beautiful
As the rocks and the grass:--not this grim ape
Although it loves you.--Yet two or three times in my
   life my walls have fallen--beyond love--no room for
   love--
I have been you". (DA 89)

In this passage the speaker experiences a feeling of oneness while dissolving his ego in the process of appreciating the world. When he says "I have been you," he does not mean, as an idealist would, that the world has become his idea, but rather that he has been emptied of ideas, has humbly effaced himself before some great outside reality. Freud characterizes the oceanic feeling as a "bond with the universe," and he says it could be analogous to being in love. He recognizes that the origin of religious feeling, that is, of an attitude of worship, may conceivably arise from the oceanic feeling. However, he sees both the religious and oceanic feelings as regressions. He cannot see the suspension of the will, which is at the root of both the oceanic feeling and of worship, as anything but arrested development. Willing, for him, is always the primary mode of existence: "I cannot discover this 'oceanic feeling' in myself," and he concludes, "From my own experience I could not convince myself of the primary nature of such a feeling" (12). In the healthy adult, he implies, the oceanic feeling has disappeared, and this is a good thing, for it is simply a vestige of infantile narcissism. Maturation, he believes, is a process of progressive separation from the world; such separation is required because the main characteristic of the external world is threat: "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection. Thus the part played by the oceanic feeling, which might seek something like the restoration of limitless narcissism, is ousted from a place in the foreground" (19).

16.   This idea of threat as the primary experience is what Wylie Sypher calls Freud's "horrid myth":

   The oceanic sense stands in contrast to another Freudian myth that has a harsher poetry--the myth of the birth of consciousness in the primal naked cellular organism whose first response is a dim awareness of the peril in the world outside the self, a recoil causing the vulnerable protoplasm to withdraw as deeply as it can inside itself. By this defensive response, the inorganic crosses the threshold into life; the world is hostile, and if the organism is to survive, it must retreat within itself. Its first encounter with reality brings only a sense of pain, danger, and rejection. Otherwise life could remain indifferent to reality outside, for whatever gives pleasure can be absorbed or "introjected" into the organism. But discovery of the external induces only antagonism, precaution, and refusal.
   Thus Freud's other myth tells us that our primal relation to the world is hate. (211)

Sypher makes an observation which connects this myth with what I believe Jeffers would call "humanism," the orientation opposite to his own:

If the developed ego, or consciousness at its highest pitch, is the distinctive human faculty, then consciousness, according to this myth, is not erotic, but given to the primitive task of self-maintenance by maneuvers that go by the name of thrift. (212)

From this point of view, ". . . if pleasure appears in this world, it does so in the perverted form of conquest" (212). This conquest may be of the external world of nature or the internal world of the mind.

17.   The important thing to note here is that the vision of the primacy of the ego over the oceanic feeling may well be, as Sypher suggests, simply one "myth" among others. For example, look at how Freud interprets the experience of the infant at the mother's breast. Here is an experience, we would think, in which threat does not enter, or is at least secondary, but Freud thinks otherwise:

An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him. He gradually learns to do so in response to various promptings. He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, which he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time--among them what he desires most of all, his mother's breast--and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help. In this way there is for the first time set over against the ego an "object," in the form of something which exists "outside" and which is only forced to appear by a special action. (13)

Freud says that the infant learns that the breast only appears "as a result of his screaming for help," or as a result of an act of will--indeed, as a result of a type of conquest. According to him, the infant learns that the breast must be "forced to appear by a special action" mine.

18.   This interpretation of Freud's is myth. First of all, it seems a reflection of Victorian child-rearing practices as much as anything else. Some mothers may wait to nurse until an infant is screaming, some may not. Second, at a crucial moment in the passage Freud substitutes a speculative for an assertive verb. Every verb is assertive, except for "must," in the sentence beginning "He must be very strongly impressed . . ." The sentence which follows this one shifts back to an assertive verb, as if the case were proven. But it hasn't been, and the shift in verbs is evidence that at some level Freud was aware of it. Beside the shift in verbs, other evidence that Freud did not completely rule out alternative interpretations can be found in his recognition that the experience of the infant at the mother's breast was at least a possible source of the oceanic feeling, and that this oceanic feeling could be the basis of later religious feelings such as reverence and worship. However, he finally and firmly believes that this prime infantile experience mainly initiates the ego's drive for power. He sees the experience as the first step in the encounter with "the reality principle which is to dominate future development."

19.   As Sypher pointed out, Freud believes that early experience teaches us not a reverential or thankful attitude, but an aggressive, hostile one. Later manifestation of a religious attitude, then, an attitude of worship for something greater than the ego, is seen by Freud only as a simple response to threat:

The derivation of religious needs from the infant's helplessness and the longing for a father aroused by it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by the fear of the superior power of Fate. (19)

Freud takes this position on the basis of no concrete evidence: his stance is ideological. I say this because it is equally plausible that the experience at the breast generates a feeling which goes by the name of wonder, or worship or reverence; it may be that here is the first recognition of grace, of life furnished to the individual by the world. Why should the appearance of the breast to the infant not be interpreted as the primal manifestation of grace? Or at least as a mixed experience including elements of both grace and threat. It is telling, I think, that Freud opposes the pleasure principle to the reality principle despite the fact that the two terms are not antonyms. If he wished to be precise he should have opposed the pleasure-principle to a "pain-principle," but that term would not carry the ideological weight that he wants. He hopes to appropriate an absolute ground for his notion that the experience of threat is primary, but there is no such ground. Perhaps both ego and reverence, hate and love develop throughout an entire lifetime from the same root experience.

20.   If this is true, the oceanic feeling is not a narcissistic one, but on the contrary, the first experience of beneficence in an "other." Sypher says:

   Opposed to the ego-principle of survival is the receptive Eros-principle. The origin of love is the yearning of the self to gratify its erotic instincts by means of the "organ-pleasure" that can reach out into the world and thus be transferred to objects toward which the self is extended by its strivings. This quest for pleasure by extending the ego through love is narcissistic insofar as the self introjects the loved object into itself, seeking to love itself. But there is likewise a "learning," or anaclitic eroticism, wherein the self depends upon the body of the mother (the breast, for example) or on some other object to satisfy the craving for pleasure. The anaclitic relation is not pre-cautionary, privative, or antagonistic. By leaning on things outside, the self transforms its relation to the world from hate to love--which is, of course, naive and unprotected. (212)

Sypher shows here that the "leaning" relation is a kind of love, and that love is as much an aspect of "reality" as hate. But by describing love as naive and unprotected he seems to grant practicality or reality value to hate. He can't quite break out of Freud's grasp. I believe, however, that Jeffers does so. Rather than being naive and unprotected, love, suggests Jeffers, may be the opposite. It may be a source of wisdom and the only final protection. In the following passage he gives the reality-principle its just due in incisive, dramatic terms, but he ends up endorsing love as finally the wisest and most secure mode of relation to the world. (The God he refers to is an immanent one, congruent with the world.)

    The world's God is treacherous and full of unreason; a
   torturer, but also
The only foundation and the only fountain.
Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes of hunger;
   who hides in the grave
To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian
Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in love with
   the God is washed clean
Of death desired and of death dreaded. (I: 371)

These do not sound like the words of the naive and unprotected; they do not sound like the words of one in flight from the reality-principle. On the contrary, they reflect a cold-eyed version of humanity's truly dangerous place in the scheme of things--yet they urge love.

21.   It is not a sentimental love, but a necessary love, to which there is no alternative and for which there is no substitute. But it also is not a forced love; there is none of the puritanical notion of "God-fearing" in it. Rather, as Jeffers says elsewhere, "It is based on the astonishing beauty of things," an essentially erotic view.

     The Excesses of God
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be 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. (I: 4)

While Jeffers recognizes fully "that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe, " he also sees that people have a place that has by grace been provided for them. Love cannot be forced--it emerges only when it is inspired into existence. Despite the fact that the world can be a torturer, and is always ultimately a murderer, it can be loved, for it is also the creator and the source of grace.

22.   Jeffers suggests that if one central principle of the world is necessity, another one, equally powerful, is excess. If one principle is pain, the other is grace. And, Jeffers says, it is not only in power that we recognize divinity, but in grace. It is the excesses of God in creating beauty that elicit our love of the world. At times Jeffers' vision is strong enough to imagine a fusion of reality and pleasure principles. He sees what Emerson said the poet ought to see: the beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary, that necessity itself generates superfluous beauty.

     Boats in a Fog
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics
      of dancers, the exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter
      earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone's throw out, between the rocks and
      the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing
      each other,
Following the cliffs for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-
      fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient
      and cautious,
Coasting all round the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey Harbor. A flight of
      pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler;
      all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the
      equally
Earnest elements of nature. (I: 110)

What Jeffers means by adult is not that the ego sees itself as an isolated force dominating its environment, but rather as a part of a larger picture, the whole of which is crucial to the identity of the part. Here we have a concrete instance of what Jeffers means by "wholeness" as the key value. To be adult is to be earnest about our interests, but also to fit into and draw meaning and sustenance from the larger frame. Jeffers is praising the frame that is balanced enough to hold both the reality and pleasure principle, both necessity and beauty, both the ego and the world.

23.   Is this vision sentimental? Is it secondary and related to a stage in infancy which must be outgrown if we are to achieve maturity and our proper "spiritual prestige"? Vendler really just recycles the ideological attack upon Jeffers launched sixty years ago by Yvor Winters; Winters, like Vendler, believed Jeffers' work to have no moral content worthy of the name. But Albert Gelpi has quite accurately asserted: "Jeffers did not abdicate the responsibilities of consciousness after all, as Winters accused him of doing, but he did construe them in terms opposite to Winters'" (443). And in terms opposite to those of Vendler and Freud as well.

24.   Jeffers, I believe, stands on its head the Freudian myth of the superior maturity of the ego. The poet identifies the egoistic (as opposed to the oceanic) aspect of the infant's relation to the world as the foundation (of humanism and) of the human race's seeming inability to avoid destroying itself either through war or environmental destruction--in short, its inability to face reality. He believes that we must give up "that puerile passion, the will to power"; Jeffers sees that the egoistic urge to dominate is self-destructive if not placed within a larger inhumanist mode of consciousness. In this he echoes Santayana when the philosopher criticizes those thinkers who overvalue the human will:

The trouble lies perhaps in this, that they are all precipitate. They have not taken the trouble to decipher human nature, which is an endowment, something many-sided, unconscious, with a margin of variation, and have started instead with the will, which is only an attitude, something casual, conscious, and narrowly absolute. Nor have they learned to respect sufficiently the external conditions under which human nature operates. . .(103)

Jeffers claims that the inhumanist consciousness, a consciousness I believe he shares with Santayana, is "an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity" (DA 174). This largeness of vision is not in any way timid or immature. From an ecological perspective, it is, in fact, a vision that our sometimes childish society must grow into if it is to survive, certainly if it is to thrive.

University of Washington, Tacoma
 

1.    There was an extremely interesting exchange several years ago in RJN (issues 77,78) between Tim Hunt and Robert Zaller concerning the significance of Vendler's attack. Hunt argues that despite the obvious animus, her article makes some important points and should not be ignored by Jeffers' admirers. Zaller grants the existence of some worthwhile insights in her review but has difficulty getting past what he sees as Vendler's "grotesque misreading" of some of Jeffers' short poems.

2.    One would expect Vendler to be more liberal in her reaction to Jeffers, or at least in her writing about him. In a 1992 article entitled, "'Tintern Abbey': Two Assaults" (Bucknell Review 36: 173-90) she defends Wordsworth from prejudiced, rigidly ideological readings on the part of some historicist critics. She does a very effective job in exposing the crude reductionsim practiced by these commentators. She especially laments their unwillingness to read Wordsworth on his own terms, and also their rush to see his work as nothing more than the symptom of various underlying historical or intellectual diseases. Unfortunately, one can see her commentary on Jeffers to suffer from the same shortcomings she so acutely delineates in the critics of Wordsworth.

Everson, William. Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as Literary Region. Berkeley: Oyez, 1976.

Falck, Colin.   Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems. Introduction. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund.   Civilization and Its Discontents. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

Gelpi, Albert.  A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Hunt, Tim. "New Wine, Old Skin: Vendler and Jeffers." Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 77 (1990): 22-25.

Jeffers, Robinson.  The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. 3 vols. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.

Jeffers, Robinson.  The Double Axe and Other Poems. 1948. New York: Liveright, 1977. Cited as DA.

Santayana, George.   The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1968.

Sypher, Wylie. Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision. New York: Random House, 1971.

Trilling, Lionel.  The Opposing Self. New York: Harcourt, 1955.

Vendler, Helen. "Huge Pits of Darkness, High Peaks of Light." The New Yorker 28 Dec. 1988: 91-95.

Zaller, Robert. "On Helen Vendler: A Reply to Tim Hunt." Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 78: 20-22.