1.    Robinson Jeffers and W. B. Yeats have been criticized for their political philosophies and beliefs, Jeffers's Inhumanism being referred to as misanthropy and Yeats's faith in art and revivifying Irish culture as ridiculously otherworldly and romantic, even opposed to the type of self-determination desired by many of the Irish. Both have been described as reactionary, aristocratic, and fascist. John Hughes in 1971 called Jeffers a "monomaniacal proto-fascist" (Alex A. Vardamis in Zaller, Centennial, 48). Cargill noted that early reviewers of Jeffers perceived an "incipient fascism" (Arthur B. Coffin 154). "For some reason," Robert Zaller explains (Centennial 27), "Jeffers's attitude, which is not unlike the position held by William Faulkner and W. B. Yeats, has always seemed aristocratic," referring to their belief in the artist's placing himself in an objective, and thus seemingly judgmental, role. In addition to his solitary stance, Jeffers also came under scrutiny for ignoring the plight of the poor: Humphries claims that Jeffers's pessimism served the ruling class (Vardamis, Critical, B185), and Jeffers has been criticized for ignoring the Depression while being sheltered from its effects. George Orwell wrote that Yeats had been deluded about oligarchy ("W. B. Yeats"). While openly criticizing what he perceives to be Yeats's celebration of violence, Orwell attributes the poet's aristocratic perspective to naivete rather than malevolence. Still, Orwell states that oligarchy would inevitably engender destruction: the new aristocrats would not be "men with Van Dyke beards" but ruthless bureaucrats (274). More judgmental than Orwell, Conor Cruise O'Brien describes Yeats's politics as "devious and sinister" (53) and writes that if the Nazis had conquered Great Britain Yeats "would have taken considerable pleasure . . . in seeing England occupied by the Nazis . . . Meanwhile in Ireland one would have expected to see him at least a cautious participant, or ornament, in a collaborationist regime" (48).

2.    In fact, what appears to be reaction in Jeffers and Yeats stems not from the desire to glorify the nation-state at the expense of the individual or bestow ultimate power in an authoritarian leader, as fascists do, but to return to an idealized tradition in Jeffers's case of independent self-sufficiency in harmony with nature and in Yeats's of a governing class educated in the highest values of statesmanship and art and knowledgeable about older Irish culture. Elizabeth Cullingford makes clear that Yeats's nationalism, like John O'Leary's, was individualist and libertarian, not autocratic (Yeats, Ireland and Fascism 1). In addition, he, like O'Leary, sought in pre-colonial Irish culture symbols for the development of a culturally unified Ireland. Although both Jeffers and Yeats were interested in politics, they also believed that poetry should involve universal concerns. As Gilbert Allen points out in "Passionate Detachment in the Lyrics of Jeffers and Yeats," for these two poets, modernist "disillusionment lies at the center of imaginative life" (61). Even in Yeats's dreamy and sonorous early poems, he sees rationalism and commerce as having rendered the world anti-poetic. "Gray Truth" in "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" (CP 7) has superseded "The woods of Arcady," and "The cold star-bane/ Has cloven and rent" the hearts of scientists, the new philosophers. In "The Lake Isle of Inisfree" (CP 39) the poet wishes to "arise and go" to an imagined idyllic life, but the reality is that he lives among "pavements gray," the landscape of the modern city. As Sidney Burris makes clear, for over half a century now, Yeats has greeted his readers with the stern pronouncement that "The woods of Arcady are dead" ("Pastoral Nostalgia and the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney," 197). In answer to the accusation that Jeffers's perspective ignores the effects of the Depression, Robert Zaller points out that Jeffers, like Faulkner, wrote about rural communities already chronically depressed ("Robinson Jeffers" 37). Jeffers did during the Depression write poetry criticizing the love of luxury ("Shine, Republic," CP 2.417), yet his criticism may have been directed at those undeniably wealthy people who had more than they needed and often had them at the expense of the poor. Unlike many modernists who predicated their aesthetic on the theme of alienation, however, Jeffers and Yeats worked out poetic philosophies that included their ideal vision for the future. Gilbert Allen claims that both Yeats and Jeffers are fundamentally concerned with history: "For Yeats, however, the past is cultural; for Jeffers, the past is geological" (61).

3.    In "Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years," Jeffers articulates his philosophy that good poetry will be understandable to people even after a thousand years. Jeffers also believes that lasting values, not temporary political dogma, should thus inform the work. William Nolte argues that Jeffers refused to subscribe to the lies "on which moral indignation feeds" (Karman, Critical, 215-16). Jeffers embraced neither Marxism nor capitalism, atheism nor Christianity; nor did he place his faith in the new religion of science. He did not believe that Hitler was responsible for all of Europe's problems nor that the defeat of the fascist powers would cure the world's ills (William H. Nolte 216), and certainly he was right that the Allied victory did not put a stop to aggression, death camps, or dictatorship. Jeffers, like Yeats, was dissatisfied with contemporary values and looked to older times for answers to the dilemma of the modern. Neither Jeffers nor Yeats in fact after youth subscribed to any religious or political dogma or any one poetic creed.

4.    Robinson Jeffers and W. B. Yeats are what I have elsewhere referred to as "radical traditionalists" ("A man who does not exist" 41-43)--that is, they looked to earlier times in order to find the values they thought might rejuvenate and inform the present, which Jeffers believed was corrupt and lacking in principle and moral strength, and Yeats believed was hostile to art and inimical to culture and heroism. They were traditionalist because both thought that these values had existed in earlier times. Their radicalism stems from belief that contemporary society had lost sight of traditional values and needed upheaval and revolution of a spiritual nature. Yeats and Jeffers differ widely, however, in their concerns although they both praise older, more heroic times and societies. Borrowing and modifying the ideas of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, Yeats looks to civilizations and cultures he admires for the values which will re-invigorate the present--great civilizations which can serve, he believes, as prototypes for an ideal. While Jeffers envisions the best world as one devoid of human habitation, he defines, on the other hand, the best way of life for human beings as the solitary, self-sufficient one.

5.    Jeffers's own philosophy is contained in a late poem called "The Last Conservative" (CP 3.418) in which he articulates the value of nature, solitude, independence, beauty, and loyalty. He has built his house in a place steeped in tradition--on a rocky outcrop where native Americans once squatted in the firelight. He has even seen the evidence of their existence in the shell-mound and red fire-stains on the rocks. The place was, he says, "Maiden," with no previous buildings or neighbors, only coyotes howling and deer in the door-yard. When he declares, "We raised two boys here; all that we saw or heard was beautiful/ And hardly human," he creates a tradition of his way of life as Yeats does in "The Municipal Gallery Re-Visited" where the poet declares of his friends,

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought
All that we did, all that we said or sang
Must come from contact with the soil, from that
Contact everything Anteus-like grew strong.
We three alone in modern times had brought
Everything down to that sole test again,
Dream of the noble and the beggarman. (CP 321)

6.    In the second stanza Jeffers despairs of the "heavy change," the world having deteriorated like a "rotting apple": streets and cars, houses, and worst of all the loss of his wife. The final stanza, however, reveals some optimism. The natural world--the source of all virtue--may have been invaded, but it exists and even permeates the human one imposed on it. The natural is the real world which will be present when human artifacts are gone:

The ocean at least is not changed at all,
Cold, grim, and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest
Haunted by the long gray squirrels and hoarse herons:
And hark the quail, running on the low roof's worn shingles
Their little feet patter like rain drops. (CP 3.418)

7.    In our own political climate, conservatism and traditionalism are not synonymous, and thus contemporary readers may quarrel with Jeffers's use of the term "conservative." Today we have become used to people who call themselves "conservatives" being in favor of the destruction of nature and advocating what they call "development," using all the natural resources they can in order to amass possessions and ignoring the older value of conservation. Jeffers, however, uses the term "conservative" as we might use "traditionalist." Suspicious of both saviors and Caesars (religious and political dogma), Jeffers believed primarily in nature itself. His tradition stemmed from geological process--as understood from the rocks, ancestry of plants and animals, and older, more self-sufficient ways of life for human beings.

8.    Radcliffe Squires points out that Jeffers's very faith in direct statement and moralistic commentary suggests traditionalism (Loyalties vii) and that he is probably the most religious of all twentieth century American poets (5). Terence Diggory continues this theme by stating that in thinking of his work in terms of a tradition, Jeffers in fact preserves the impersonal aesthetic that he feared he had abandoned: "Tradition, as a dimension of the self, is a larger-than-life dimension such as Jeffers had sought to incorporate in the characters of his narratives and plays" (132). Jeffers as well as Yeats pondered the emptiness of their own epoch; Yeats also expressed disgust at what he believed was a new materialism. Even when Jeffers seems to be at his most extreme point of anti-humanism, he is a traditionalist. "The Love and the Hate," argues Robert Zaller, although marred by rhetoric and questionable taste, is nevertheless one of the sparest and most classical of Jeffers's narratives; "the action is swift, the development taut, the dialogue terse and direct" (Cliffs 193). It remains the most powerful American anti-war poem (193). Jeffers upholds the values of protest and individual conscience, which have long been held to be American principles even though almost any attempt at individualism in America is crushed either by public policy or public opinion.

9.    Jeffers's description of himself in "The Last Conservative" as representing the close of an era is in fact reminiscent of Yeats's claim in "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" that "We were the last romantics--chose for theme/ Traditional sanctity and loveliness" (CP 245). He declares himself part of the romantic tradition, while in other poems he reaches beyond his own traditions to those of the eighteenth century statesmen Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan and to the nobles of the high Italian Renaissance for prototypes. In The Book of Yeats's Vision, Hazard Adams identifies Yeats's dilemma as his seemingly contradictory motives: he is a modern romantic poet (161).

10.    Deploring the world of commerce, Yeats offers in its place the triad of aristocrat-artist-peasant. Shopkeepers intent on soul and money (values which seem contradictory, until one realizes the material nature of "saving the soul") have "dried the marrow from the bone" (made themselves timid) and killed the spirit of romantic Ireland. Seamus Deane argues that Yeats's aesthetic emanates from "that long line of European Romantic writers who combined a revolutionary aesthetic with traditionalist politics" (Celtic Revivals 38), that one of Yeats's dominant themes was release from British empirical philosophy and urban industrial capitalism. In opposition to materialist philosophy, Yeats chooses peasant and aristocrat, kindred spirits against industrialism, the one representing traditional ways of life which keep alive the ancient songs and stories, the other perpetuating the culture through its education and generosity. Yeats wanted to restore what he conceived of as older traditions--to make the peasants' stories current among the educated classes in order to revivify Irish culture. The poet furthermore wanted the new Ireland to resemble his ideal of Ancient Hibernia. The people's new sense of nationhood would be drawn from older conventions and expressed through a new, national art inspired by tradition; Yeats wrote in 1904 that the Irish "must grope [their] way toward a new yet ancient perfection" (Letters, 440). He was thus both radical--in wanting to create a new Ireland--and traditional--in using old Irish customs and beliefs in order to do so. New perfection is thus the essence of Yeats's radicalism; ancient perfection is the essence of his traditionalism.

11.    Jeffers too clearly saw the interdependence of moral and economic ideologies, as for example in "Ave Caesar" when he portrays the crippling contradiction at America's heart--we want freedom and wealth too (Dana Gioia in Robert Brophy, Jubilee, 215). In "Ave Caesar" (CP 2.486) he notes the discrepancy between what we say we are and what we really are: our ancestors also wanted both freedom and wealth. Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar--a dictator--or rather "Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep/ Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive," so that they need not defend themselves. Although Americans pride themselves on their independence, they are "easy to manage, a gregarious people/ Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries." Materialism remains for Jeffers the fundamental flaw in the American character as it remained for Yeats the flaw in the character of modern Ireland.

12.    Earlier, in "Shine, Republic" (CP 2.417) Jeffers identifies what he believes is good in the western democracies: "The love of freedom has been the quality of western man." The "stubborn torch" flames from Marathon to Concord, "its dangerous beauty binding three ages/ Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have eclipsed but have never quenched it" (CP 2.417). In one noble passion--love of freedom--the Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and Americans are one. He apostrophizes America:

You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
You did not say "en mass," you said "independence." But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.
You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar.

13.    Nevertheless, he enjoins the nation to keep its traditions, forms, and observances, so that future nations will learn from it: "The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury." Still, the reader feels that it is not concern for the future that inspires Jeffers but concern for the present. There may be time for Americans to quell their love of luxury and to create of their nation what they always thought it might have been. His exhortation makes sense even today when 20% of the population owns 95% of the country's wealth and exercises virtually total control over the choices the rest have. He might also advise us, however, not to blame our dependence upon large corporations but on materialism itself. I suspect, in addition, that Jeffers would believe it a sign of our national degradation of self-reliance that people are so economically interdependent.

14.    In the thematically related earlier poem, "Shine, Perishing Republic" (1.5), Jeffers declares that America is succumbing not because its people have lost the love of freedom but because it has lost its hardness, spareness, and sense of itself as a republic. It "settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire." Protest--what we have always claimed to respect--is so short-lived that it is "a bubble in the molten mass" that "pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens" like lava, anticipating for us the anti-war protests of the late 1960s. Then the poet recalls to his own satisfaction that what lives rots, falls, and decays to make compost for new growth. As in "Descent to the Dead," in which he declares that the old cultures also flamed for an instant and produced beautiful tragedy, in "Shine, Perishing Republic" the country is a "mortal splendor"--a short-lived luminary. Meteors, however, are not needed less than mountains even if they do not last so long; similarly, the country will shine brilliantly for an instant before it dissolves. Yet he cautions: "for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center." Corruption co-exists with politics and civilization.

15.    For all his praise of the western democracies' love of freedom in "Shine, Perishing Republic," nevertheless their own freedom has always been more valuable to them than that of other nations. Long before the United States became engaged in political imperialism in Southeast Asia, and long before its economic imperialism in South America had been well-publicized and recognized, Jeffers knew that America was becoming an empire. He had thought of the people (Americans), he says in "Shine, Empire" (CP 3.17), as "something higher than the natural run of the earth," no doubt because of their love of freedom; but, he says, he was wrong: "we are lower. We are the people who hope to win wars with money as we win elections." (Jeffers's prescience is apparent when we realize how much was spent on the Vietnam conflict and how diligently the American administration worked to persuade the South Vietnamese to accept the government that the U.S. wished to impose on them.) He believes that the future is already decided: "We must put freedom away and stiffen into bitter empire." Now, our ideals thoroughly compromised, we aim at world rule like the ancient kingdoms that have disappeared (Assyria, Rome) and the newer ones that have been vitiated (Britain, Germany).

16.    In "Hellenistics" (CP 2.526) Jeffers takes the ironic tone of one who is glad that we have given up our notions of freedom: we are well quit of it because we have traded it for prosperity. Section I begins with images of western civilization, a Greek-derived design on a vase (reminiscent of Keats) and a four-drachma piece with the head of Alexander. Now he looks at the coast where he sees the God who preceded all of civilization and culture--the God seen in nature. Section II declares all human beings to be contemptible. He regrettably describes "the dull welter of Asia" and "squalid savages along the Congo," misunderstanding that those who appear to him to be savages may be the inheritors of a longer tradition. These sights cause him to claim that beasts are not contemptible--mankind is, however. Even our own Puritan "frost-bitten forefathers" are more shameful than beasts. At least the Greeks, he declares, "pared down the shame of three vices/ Natural to man and no other animal": cruelty, filth, and superstition (religion). Ancient cultures were endowed with some virtue, which modern cultures are not.

17.    Section III foretells the end of the age: after the fighting will come "flowering and ordered prosperity." The age will then be vitiated; people in the cities of the empire will say, "Freedom? Freedom was a fire. We are well quit of freedom, we have found prosperity." They will deny evil in the spoiled, "sterile" time, but after the death of freedom the age will change again--"slowly the machines will break down, slowly the wilderness returns." This section, however, also declares that a new dark age will come, the wars will go on, "all the little Caesars fidget on their thrones."

18.    Section IV celebrates this new age of barbarism which Jeffers equates with strength and moral purity. He tells the "distant future children" to mourn their "own dead" but not "civilization," "our scuttled futilities." These children of a new dark age are saved from what present society is: "little empty bundles of enjoyment." Their lives will become "lovely and terrible again, great and in earnest." The new people will stand among spears, proud and unafraid. The real evils are not "hardship, hunger and violence" which the new age will come to know; they are cruelty, filth, and superstition. It is this desire for earnestness and meaning in the lives of the people which he shares with Yeats. Some critics have seen in Jeffers both reformist and traditional Jeffersonian Democrat. Jeffers's republic is self-contained and minds its own business, like the solitary rider on the mountain whose way of life Jeffers praises. He sees and proclaims the spiritual failure of modern values (Rudolph Gilbert 92): "In this tyranny of scientific materialism and of political enslavement, work has become drudgery" (Gilbert 35). Jeffers detested dictatorship, "right, left, or center," which would limit personal freedom. Jeffers's preference for small ranches is similar to Wendell Berry's belief that people should support themselves simply on the land and Thomas Jefferson's vision of a nation of yeoman farmers who provided for themselves and their families without servants or slaves. Thus, in the midst of his seeming anti-Americanism he is perhaps the most American.

19.    While Yeats's style lacks the spareness of Jeffers's, at times he wishes for the same sort of simplicity. William Everson deems the line of Jeffers's "A Barren Foreland" to be Yeatsian: "There are only simple things here" (Everson in Zaller, Centennial, 181). Yeats proclaims, for example, in "A Prayer on Going into My House" that he wants

No table or chair or stool not simple enough
For shepherd lads in Galilee; and grant
That I myself for portions of the year
May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing
But what the great and passionate have used
Throughout so many varying centuries
We take it for the norm. . . (CP 162).

20.    On the other hand, while Yeats's own house preserves this simplicity and heroism, other houses must preserve the material culture that is emblematic of greatness. In the long sequence called "Meditations in a Time of Civil War" the poem "Ancestral Houses" (CP 200) addresses the issue of the importance of tradition. In this poem as in "To a Wealthy Man . . . " (CP 107), Yeats declares that the great and wealthy have the responsibility of providing to the people what is necessary for their culture. This poem is addressed to a man who had declared that he would contribute to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if enough people demonstrated by means of small contributions that they wanted a museum. Yeats declares that the Renaissance patron of the arts Duke Ercole had not stopped to ask what the onion-sellers wanted before "he bid his mummers to the marketplace." It was the duty of the wealthy and cultivated to contribute to the culture because they possessed the knowledge. They must give "the right twigs for an eagle's nest!" Yeats does not take responsibility for the culture from the common people or the middle class; he instead chides the educated and cultivated for not accepting their responsibility for guiding the rest. Further, in "Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation" (CP 95) Yeats acknowledges that land reform may help the small farms ("Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall") but the great house was the only one that could provide for the people the cultural resources to create a new nation:

The gifts that govern men, and after these
To gradual Time's last gift, a written speech
Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease.

21.    In the same spirit, the material culture in "Ancestral Houses" becomes an emblem of this cultivated greatness as well as an emblem of the culture itself. Yeats describes in the first ottava-rima stanza what is necessary for the creation of art:

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains. (CP 200)

     might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The greatness none there had ever known.

22.    The stanza finishes, however, with the foreboding thought that the great man may not pass on his talent and willingness to be a patron. The poet praises the leisure that is necessary:

. . . gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,

. . . levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease,

. . . the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,

. . . famous portraits of our ancestors.

23.    Yeats follows this poem with "My House," the restored Norman tower he called Tor Ballylee:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
. . . A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and a written page.

24.    The following poems describe his table--a board and two heavy trestles--where the ancient sword, a gift from Junzo Sato in 1920, rests beside pen and paper. Emblematic of tradition, it must "moralise/ My days of their aimlessness." It is so old that "Chaucer had not drawn breath/ When it was forged." In the tradition in which the sword was created, artistic accomplishments should be passed from father to son throughout the centuries. The process of creating art and passing on tradition became unchanging and universal: "Men and their business took/ The soul's unchanging look." In "My Descendants" Yeats returns to the dilemma of "Ancestral Houses": the older generation bequeaths the tradition, but with each succeeding generation the danger of losing that tradition increases. The towers may fall to ruin, however, but the stones remain (as they do in Jeffers's "Tor House"). The series of poems is emblematic both of ancient tradition and of tradition created. Unable to believe in the viability of the very customs he values so deeply, Yeats establishes his own.

25.    Many years later, as the initial poem for a final volume, Yeats wrote in "Under Ben Bulben" that new Irish poets should learn their trade and

Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds. (327)

Three types of men have made all beautiful things, Aristocracies have made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above the fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear, and the artists have made all the rest, because Providence has filled them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleased them. (qtd. in Cullingford 71).

26.    For Jeffers, on the other hand, culture and civilization are both culprits that leave the lives of people devoid of meaning. In "New Mexican Mountain" (CP 2.158) he paints a picture of spiritual starvation. The Native American people had lost much of their culture--so much so that the young men are reluctant to dance and must be persuaded by the older men. Although the ceremony is but a "poor show," white Americans come willingly to see it. They are "People from cities, anxious to be human again," spiritually hungry "Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion, poetry; pilgrims from the vacuum" of their sterile lives. The drum, however, remains truly alive, sending the message that "civilization is a transient sickness." What Jeffers would have people return to is a purer form of tribal life more in tune with nature than the alienated and alienating civilization.

27.    The hermit in "Thebaid" (2.532), reminiscent of the stoic Chinese philosophers in Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," gazes with "great stunned eyes" not at a religious miracle but at the elements--the sun rising and setting, desert sand, night stars, the "incredible magnificence of things." All others are jejune prophets and believers, delirious with their faith. Weak people turn to Mother Church (religion) and Father State (law), to some savior like Christ, Marx, or Hitler (who offer only dream and magic). Civilization, he asserts in the second stanza, breeds weak people who must turn to religion and become obsessed and kill for it. Those who desire to live "harmlessly" must find a cave in a mountain or desert, avoid human beings, exist with "kindly wolves" and "luckier ravens," and wait "for the end of the age." The last living man will surely be able to behold the earth as it is--"the real earth and skies,/ Actual life and real death."

28.    While Jeffers believed that civilization engendered evil, however, much that was good (high culture) came from it. "Still the Mind Smiles" (CP 2.310) states ironically that while civilization makes humanity ridiculous, yet its whole fabric is beautiful; the excesses balance each other like "the paired wings of a flying bird." In order to find good in this horrible freedom-denying society ("this fretful time"), it is necessary to remember the "same-colored wings of imagination" that humanity will try to clip and impede, but which grow nevertheless in "lonely places." These are "the unchanged/ Lives of herdsmen and mountain farms,/ Where men are few, and few tools, a few weapons, and their dawns are beautiful." This same impulse inspires Yeats to desire that his dwelling-place contain nothing that shepherd-lads in Galilee would not have understood and that the traditional peasant culture of Ireland be preserved.

29.    The city-dwellers in "Sirens" (CP 3.4), however, prefer sterile amusements--alcohol, opiates, lust rather than the "angels of life"--as they move between news-cast and work-desk. This reliance on frivolous things is another sign that the age needs renewal. The people are like Yeats's common ones in "The Fisherman," the witty man who tells jokes to please the crowd, the clever man who clowns, beating down great Art and those who are wise. Seeing art rejected was the "reality" he faced. Scorning the modern audience's penchant for trivial amusement, Yeats imagines his ideal audience, the man in "grey Connemara cloth," solitary, wise, and quiet. His identity is ambiguous: he may be an Irish peasant or an Anglo-Saxon gentleman, but he is certainly a noble countryman whose life itself becomes a work of art, so integrated is he with his surroundings. The masses in both poems ignore the values on which their cultures were founded, and so their lives lack earnestness and fulfillment.

30.    Nor is Jeffers's tradition that of old civilizations. In "Subjected Earth" (CP 2.128), part of the series "Descent to the Dead," it is Oxfordshire and London which have too long been subjected by the population. The earth of old civilizations is domesticated and passive. The poet looks over a field which he describes with Yeatsian intonation: "a flight of lapwings/ Whirled in the hollow of the field," and he remembers his own bold, brave coast. Thinking of the passive Old World, "Worn and weak with too much humanity," he envisions Britain as it was before domestication--swamps, heavy forest, black beech and oak, people shivering by fires, wild dogs and wild forest--and will be again when the present age has passed.

31.    Cities everywhere have become mere traps. "The Purse-Seine" (CP 2.517) gives a much bleaker picture than "What Are Cities For?" (CP 2.418) which merely assures us that goldenrod will one day break up the concrete of New York as asphodel covers Sicilian Syracuse. The city in "The Purse-Seine" is fearful and destructive. Jeffers begins with the description of the sardine fishermen off the Monterey coast who must work by night in the dark of the moon. The brightness of sunlight or moonlight would obscure the phosphorescence of the fish shoals. The fishermen circle the shoal and drift the net, then close the circle and draw it in. The scene is beautiful and terrible when the crowded fish know they are caught, beating the water "to a pool of flame" while outside the net, sea lions watch and "the vast walls of night/ Stand erect to the stars." The view of a great city inspires in Jeffers the same beauty and terror:

We have geared the machines and locked all together into
interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations
incapable of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. (CP 2.518)

32.    Jeffers also understood the moral conflict in contemporary life. He writes in Themes in My Poems that there exists a

spiritual conflict that lies at the heart of our culture, and creates a strain there. The religions and ethics of other civilizations were more or less home-grown; they adapted themselves to the people, and the people to the religions; but Christianity is Oriental and Near-Eastern in origin, and was imposed on the western races rather recently, as history goes; and we have never got used to it. We still hold two sets of ethics, pagan and Christian, simultaneously. For instance, we say that we should love our enemies and not resist evil; yet at the same time we believe in justice, and that criminals ought to be punished, and that we should meet force with force, violence with violence. Or another instance: we believe in humility; but we also believe in masculine pride and self-assertion . . . (22-23).

Things are the God, you will love God, and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature.

33.    Moreover, the myriad inventions do not even improve life. In "Edison" (CP 2.173) he declares that the "careful gifts of good men/ Narrow the lives and erode the souls of people." Edison was a "light-bringer" like Prometheus; human beings then used his gift merely to invent weapons and bombs. Again, the poet prefers traditional tools because the newer ones bring only destruction. In "The Answer" he admonishes people not to live apart from nature but to realize that we are part of it and dependent on it, to make certain that whatever benevolent capacity science once had for man is not perverted into new modes of destruction and debilitating mechanical convenience (Coffin 213); in "Staggering Back Towards Life" (CP 3.135) he declares that radar and rockets, chemistry, and the tricks of physics are new cunning rather than new science. Human society needed "a new dark-age, four hundred years of winter and the tombs for dwellings."

34.    The answer is a new age of re-invigoration, which Yeats would have approved of. Jeffers's attitude is not Carlyle's hero-worship: "it is the simple longing for a bygone day when men of heroic vision were also permitted heroic deeds" (Coffin 127). For Jeffers, the older tradition allows the individual the independence to live his life, do his work, and remain free from the artificial demands of civilization. Robert Zaller remarks that urban life reinforces narcissism and anomie in a self-perpetuating cycle: "Divorced materially, intellectually, and spiritually from the natural world, modern man was enclosed in the artifice of his cities . . ." (Cliffs 207). "The Broken Balance" was the broken balance of nature:

As modern man lost his organic connection to the earth he increasingly perceived it as an object of conquest; the overlap between these events he called "progress." Progress was the ultimate project of the modern will, the reduction of the world to terrain, of universal process to naive recurrences that, once deciphered, passively awaited man's disposal. But progress itself was curiously afflicted by loss of affect, increasing mastery by loss of control, as purpose degenerated into mere persistence and finally "deep indifference," a mechanized somnambulism in which the will, having lost even the memory of its own command, drifted destructively in a phantasmal void. Lost amid conquest, modern men were dwindled and anxious; in the mass they seemed still more vulnerable, as they clung to each other for support. (206)

35.    Jeffers's ideal life looks to an older time before civilization began to corrupt the human race. Jeffers offers, as an antidote to this sterile time and spiritually bankrupt civilization, the love of nature and solitude. In the first lines of the narrative "Mara" (CP 3.38) Ferguson tells himself he has the best life--he lives in the country, rides horses, and herds cattle. Again, in an untitled late verse (CP 3.424) Jeffers states that the best life belongs to those who ride horses and drive cattle. "What's the best life for a man?" he asks in the first line and then answers:

To ride the wind. To ride horses and herd cattle
In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain,
and come home hungry in the evening
And eat and sleep. (CP 3.424)

     I too
Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of
cattle on the mountain pasture, plowers of remote
Rock narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life.

36.    In "The Wind-Struck Music" (CP 2.520), which precedes "The Coast Road," the children of such a solitary rancher are already corrupted. Jeffers personalizes this rancher as Tom Birnam who rides with his friend Ed Stiles on the bare hills alone above Mal Paso. The old man gallops after a heifer and takes a spill; then, when Ed asks Tom if he's hurt, Tom answers that his four strong sons are still abed in silk pajamas and in turn asks Ed why he, Tom, still works. Ed replies that it must be the sunrises--which Tom has earlier said he has no time to watch. The narrative finishes with Tom's death at eighty-one, all those years lived under open skies and concerned only with cattle, horses, and hunting; that is, with "no thought or emotion that all his ancestors since the ice-age/ Could not have comprehended." Jeffers declares Birnam's to be a good life--narrow perhaps, but vastly better than most, and more beautiful: "the wind-struck music man's bones were moulded to make the harp for." The active life creates its own music. Tom Birnan has become part of nature which Jeffers advises readers to do in "The Answer" (CP 2.536): People should not be deluded by dreams, should accept that all civilizations are transient, should avoid senseless violence and keep their integrity, and above all should love "the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man/ Apart from that."

37.    Jeffers finds his answer in geological time and the divine nature of the universe itself; Yeats finds his in culture, tradition, and art. Lacking viable tradition, they both created poetic philosophies from older values--earnestness of purpose, clarity of vision, timeless ways of life in harmony with nature. Both rejected the materialism of their times which they believed perpetuated a sterile, uninspiring culture. If they seemed to desire the end of the present age, their reason is that they had faith not in destruction but in the eternity of recurring cycles and they hoped that re-adopted older ways would re-invigorate civilization. Alienated not from modern humankind but from its materialism, Yeats and Jeffers sought from history and tradition ways to unify and revivify modern culture.

1.    Tim Hunt describes Jeffers's work as containing both "radical" and "traditional" elements (in Zaller, Centennial, 102).

2.    In a 1914 note to this poem Yeats explains that three public events stirred his imagination--the controversy over Parnell, the dispute over The Playboy of the Western World, and the third the refusal of the Dublin Corporation to provide a building to house Hugh Lane's art collection. He writes,

These controversies, political, literary, and artistic, have showed that neither religion nor politics can of itself create minds with enough receptivity to become wise, or just and generous enough to make a nation. . . Against all this we have but a few educated men and the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor. Both were stronger forty years ago, before the rise of our new middle class which made its first public display during the nine years of the Parnellite split, showing how base at moments of excitement are minds without culture. (CP 596)

Primary Sources:

Jeffers, Robinson.

The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. 3 Vols. Stanford Univ. P., 1988, 1989, 1991.
Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years. Ward Ritchie P., 1949.
The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers: 1897-1962. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P., 1968.
Themes in My Poems. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1956.

Yeats, William Butler.

The Poems. Vol. I of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
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