1.    Many of the earliest European emigrants to the New World imagined it the new earthly paradise promised in the Book of Revelation. From this imagination, American national, social, and cultural characteristics grew to be, in part, constructed by an apocalyptic ideology which evokes images of prophetic disclosures, final judgement, and making the world anew. It is an ideology that Robinson Jeffers is wont to probe, as he does in "Blind Horses" (CP2:519): "This is/not quite a new world. / The old shepherd has been known before; great and progressive/empires have flourished before…." Lines like these serve as, in the words of William Everson (Brother Antonius), an "indictment of civilization" (60). Everson, like Jeffers, warns that a "humanity turned from contemplation inevitably becomes obsessed with itself, (becomes a society driven by) complacency, licentiousness and violence" (60-61). Everson's ideas of complacency, licentiousness and violence are a fair likeness to Jeffers's evaluation of twentieth century American society and culture; they are also typically apocalyptic. Jeffers saw American society and culture as one that participated almost blindly in the horrors of two world wars and their attendant ideologies of fascism, nuclear peacekeeping, and final solutions. Jeffers saw the apocalyptic implications of such a society and culture, and many of his lyric poems exhibit an apocalypticism that, while fueled by Christianity, is ultimately more a social and cultural critique than a religious one.

There is plenty of precedence for a cultural reading of apocalypticism. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn demonstrates how apocalypticism, while essentially a Christian construct, can become a cultural one. Cohn tells us that in the Middle Ages the raw materials out of which (an apocalypticism) was gradually built up…consisted of a miscellaneous collection of prophecies inherited from the ancient world. Originally all these prophecies were devices by which religious groups, at first Jewish and later Christian, consoled , fortified and asserted themselves when confronted by the threat or the reality of oppression. (19)

2.    As theosophy, apocalypticism can be read as a body of doctrine relating to a deity based on the intuitions or prophecy—the divine wisdom—of a supersensible individual. As a cultural construct, apocalypticism comes to be a way by which people imagine and protect themselves from the society and the culture in which they live. It is my argument that Americans can read the apocalypticism in Jeffers's poetry as an attempt to "console, fortify and assert themselves when confronted by the threat or the reality of oppression," and not only as a body of divinely inspired doctrine.

3.    In order to support a cultural reading of apocalypse, a brief discussion of culture is necessary. In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams puts forth three categories of culture: these are the "the 'ideal', the 'documentary', and the 'social'" (41). It is the "social" definition, or aspect, of culture which applies best to my notion of cultural apocalypticism. For Williams, the "social" definition of culture is

a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior. The analysis of culture, from such a definition, is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture. (41)

4.    Such a cultural imagining of apocalypticism is an American tradition of long standing (remembering John Winthrop charging his followers that they must be as a "city upon a hill"), and, while it is a particularly American trait, apocalypticism is certainly older than America, and it has roots in several distinct cultures, as Stephen D. O'Leary reminds us:

though there are significant differences between the Hindu myth of the Kali Yuga, the Teutonic legend of Ragnorok, and Judeo-Christian vision of the Last Judgment, these traditions exhibit a common concern: to understand successive human ages and their culmination in a catastrophic struggle between the forces of good and evil (5).

5.    Robinson Jeffers, and his poetry, have long been labeled apocalyptic, but I think for the wrong reasons. Readers tend to think of apocalypticism only in religious terms, and they also tend to think of apocalypse only in terms of cataclysm and disaster. When read as a cultural text rather then a religious one, the cataclysmic imagery of the Book of Revelation serves as metaphor or analogy for that oppression against which we seek to console or fortify ourselves. In other words, we see the cataclysmic events of the world—the Civil War, the atomic holocaust, AIDS—as analogous to the cataclysmic events of the Book of Revelation. A great deal of the literature labeled as apocalyptic is so labeled because it focuses on cataclysm and disaster in the world, and uses the cataclysmic imagery of the Book of Revelation to describe those events. A misconception, then, is created: that of apocalypse meaning disaster.

6.    Such a misconception can do great disservice to the task of analyzing and understanding apocalyptic literature. Critical response to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers often included this kind of misconception. Consider these exerpts from initial reviews of The Double Axe, arguably Jeffers's response to World War II: Time magazine called it "a necrophillic nightmare!"; the poetry magazine Voices condemned the silent violence and horror of the title poem; the Nation criticized the horrible ad lurid violence perpetuated by the characters of the poems; the Library Journal called it a "violent, hateful book"; and the Saturday Review of Literature complained that Jeffers "felt compelled to add more than his quota of hatred and violence abroad in the world, while he sits in that properly inhuman stone tower of his waiting exultantly for the Bomb" (see Everson's forward to The Double Axe, xii-xiii). Notice the constant reiteration of "violence"; just as many readers misread the Book of Revelation, paying attention only to the violence, many readers misread Jeffers's allusion to apocalyptic violence, and condemn him as a hateful and inhumane poet. To do so is as gross a misinterpretation of Jeffers as it is of apocalypticism.

7.    What is forgotten in such a reading of either apocalypticism or Jeffers is the promise of a new earthly paradise. Recall Cohn's formulation in which we read apocalyptic texts to console and fortify ourselves: the consolation comes from the promise of a new earthly paradise that follows the cataclysm and destruction. Read as Judeo-Christian doctrine, apocalypse is the Last Judgement, the moment when saints are divided from sinners and given their just reward: then new earthly paradise. But read as a cultural text, apocalypticism is the culmination of human recklessness, and apocalyptic literature is a last call to the human race to cease the destruction. It is the hope of the apocalyptist that if the human race ceases to heap destruction upon itself it might realize this world, this place, this earth, as paradisical indeed. Because I want to give Jeffers's poetry this kind of cultural apocalyptic reading, I have chosen those poem that center on world events, those poems that discuss the damage we do to our spirit and our planet, and those poems which demonstrate that last call, the apocalyptic narrator crying out to the world that we must stave off total destruction. Even if read as a cultural and not a religious text, apocalyptic literature still relies upon the basic elements and structure of the Book of Revelation. The three elements I will concentrate on in this essay are the apocalyptic imagery of cataclysm and new earthly paradise, the linear progression of time and the historicity that implies, and the narrative methodology of the Book of Revelation. It is my argument that because all three elements are at work in his poetry, Robinson Jeffers is truly an apocalyptist.

8.    Etymologically speaking, the word apocalypse does not mean cataclysm, destruction, or disaster, and while the Book of Revelation is replete with those things, they are there to foreground what is to follow. The etymology of the word apocalypse is the Greek apokalupsis: to uncover or reveal (the root is kalupto, to cover or conceal, plus the apo, meaning not or un-). Recall that the book of the Bible we are fond of calling the Apocalypse is actually the Revelation to St. John. The word "apoclaypse" is eschatological in nature (the root being eschatos, furthest or uttermost) and is therefore concerned with last things—specifically the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell—but also with the final destiny of the soul of humankind, which is most often interpreted as a doctrine or belief about the coming of the kingdom of God. Thus eschatology, and by extension apocalypse, implies not only a catastrophic end, but also a new era to come, the fulfillment of the promise of a new earthly paradise.

9.    A great deal of the critical analysis given apocalypticism has used the following formula: a writer uses imagery from the Book of Revelation, such as a blood moon or an earthquake or invasion from the East, and so his or her text is apocalyptic. In the Americas, literature has also been called apocalyptic when it evidences a belief in the discovery of the New World as a fulfillment of the Book of Revelation's promise of a new earthly paradise. Jeffers, too, echoes this American fascination with new worlds and last chances. One of Jeffers's most often anthologized, and very early poems, "Shine, Perishing, Republic" (CP 1:15), evidences this fascination, but also argues that mere fascination does not imply citizenship in the new earthly paradise. The opening of the poem warns of an America "heavily thickening to empire," and goes on to acknowledge that decadence can lead to fecundity: "I sadly smiling remember that the flower fads to make the fruit, the fruit rots to make the earth." The poem ends on another note of warning: "be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master./ There is the trap that catches the noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked the earth." The allusion seems to be that even in this place we once declared the new earthly paradise, corruption—"mortal splendor"—threatens. The idea that decadence must precede fecundity is indeed apocalyptic, but missing from Jeffers's poem is any promise of a new earthly paradise to arise from the decadence and fecundity of the civilization, the society, the culture of America. Such a promise is, of course, missing because it is Jeffers's point that we routinely mistake America as the new earthly paradise, while he sees it as perhaps something closer to the original paradise, snakes and all. In "Shine, Perishing Republic," then, Jeffers's apocalypticism turns in on itself; apocalypticism becomes a way of examining the long tradition of apocalypticism in the Americas.

10.    If in "Shine, Perishing Republic" Jeffers is less than convinced of America's status as a new earthly paradise, in "Shiva" (CP 1:605), he is at least more willing to admit the apocalyptic construct of final destruction followed by creation anew. Even though Jeffers' title invokes the Hindu god of destruction and creation, the poem exhibits a Christian eschatology. Because Shiva is the god of destruction and creation, we are reminded that according to Christian theology, the final destruction at Armageddon will lead to the creation of the new earthly paradise. Jeffers embodies Shiva in the hawk, who is "picking the birds out of our sky." These birds are variously described as the "pigeons of peace and security," honesty and confidence, "the lonely heron of liberty," the arts, the sciences, the state: in short, everything that Jeffers at once holds dear and is astutely afraid of. In the first part of the poem Jeffers allows the hawk Shiva her destructive powers. In the second part, however, Jeffers makes clear that creation is impossible without destruction. The poem closes:

The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things.
Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme,
Empty darkness under death-tent wings.
She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch a new brood,
Hang new heavens with new birds, all will be renewed.

11.    It is difficult to remove Christian theology from our minds when we discuss apocalypse and the Book of Revelation, but it is important to keep in mind that, while Jeffers may employ the methodology and the imagery of the Book of Revelation, he does not necessarily employ its theology. As Wayne Cox, in "Robinson Jeffers and the Conflict of Christianity," observes, "Jeffers rejected all formal systems of mass belief or worship," such as Christianity, which Cox, in opposition to Everson, argues that Jeffers rejects "because it is anthropomorphic and exalts humankind to a central place in the universe" (123). Jeffers's new earthly paradise is not one in which Jesus Christ returns triumphant. Rather, it is a very earthly one indeed, consistent with his Inhumanism, which Jeffers describes in the original preface to The Double Axe as "a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things, and a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe" (172). Jeffers's use of Christianity-based eschatology then can be seen as a structural tactic, not a religious one. Cox suggests of the play Dear Judas that Jeffers wrote it "using the traditional Christian myth as a framework (basing it upon passages from the gospels) because he was 'thinking of Jesus as a subject for tragedy—the Greeks had many demigods; we have only that one and the subject of tragedy cannot be a perfect person'" (125). I suggest that Jeffers does the same with the Book of Revelation. He uses the cataclysmic imagery, for example, not to promote Christian theology but as a vehicle for or framework of an argument and an ethic that has much to do with cultural and social criticism of America, and little to do with the Book of Revelation's promise that Jesus Christ will walk the earth again. We can begin to see added evidence of Jeffers's use of apocalypticism as cultural and social criticism when we examine the linear progression of time and the historicity in apocalypticism.

12.    Because it is eschatological, apocalypse must be concerned with time, and the recounting of time, history. Lois Parkinson Zamora, in her introduction to The Apocalyptic Vision in America, notes that "apocalypse is a revelation of spiritual realities in the future, realities which are given temporal sequence and historical embodiment by the apocalyptist" (2). In apocalyptic works the progression of time is essentially linear, the apocalyptist describing one event as following another, leading toward a goal which lies at the end of history . Even though apocalypse projects the "patterns of creation, growth, decay, (catastrophe), renewal" (Zamora,3), apocalypticism is not cyclical: events do not repeat themselves but belong to "a definite pattern of historical relationships" (Zamora, 3) which reveal themselves, one after the other. Or, especially pursuant to the work at hand, they are revealed by the apocalyptist in the narrative methodology I argue is inherent in all apocalyptic works.

13.    A pattern of historical relationships are equally important to the Book of Revelation and Jeffers' apocalyptic poetry. The historicity of apocalypticism is evident in at least two ways. First, it is evident in that the Book of Revelation is but the last of many apocalyptic books in the Bible, which is to say that there is a history of apocalypticism. Apocalypticism, while most closely associated with the Book of Revelation, is a tradition older than that final book of the Bible. Both the Book of Daniel and the Book of Jeremiah can be read as apocalyptic, and, as Avihu Zakai illustrates in Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America, both the Puritans and the sixteenth century Spanish explorers read Genesis and Exodus as apocalyptic.² Thus, while the Book of Revelation does serve as the primary model for most apocalyptic literature, it is important to know the Old Testament (or Hebrew Bible) tradition of apocalypticism, too. As Richard Bauckham, in The Theology of the Book of Revelation, points out, "Revelation is saturated with verbal allusions to the Old Testament. These are not incidental but essential to the way meaning is conveyed. Without noticing some of the key allusions, little if anything of the meaning of the images will be understood" (18). The second way apocalypticism is historical, then, is that it uses social and cultural history to construct its imagery. The serpent or the dragon, Revelation's pervasive symbol for evil in the world, has Biblical roots in Genesis (3:14-15) and Isaiah (27:1), and the image of the serpent also maintains "wide cultural resonances in the minds of contemporary readers, owing to its prominence in pagan mythology and religion" (Bauckham 19). Revelation relies on other contemporary allusions as well, most notably civic or social ones. The idea of invading armies (Rev. 9:13-16, 16:12) reflects a very real fear of Roman invasion, and "when Revelation pictures the kings of the east invading the Empire in alliance with 'the beast who was and is not and is about to ascend from the bottomless pit' (17:8), it is echoing the contemporary myth which pictured the emperor Nero…as either villainous tyrant or as a savior figure" (Backham 19).

14.    And so we see the blending of history and cataclysm in apocalypticism which is necessary for the Biblical apocalyptist. It is no less important for Jeffers. In "The Day is a Poem" (CP3:16), Jeffers begins with the words "This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we heard his voice," and we are immediately historically located. Jeffers's politics are well known, much discussed, and much maligned, and I will not pursue that discussion here. But even the most casual reader of Jeffers could not miss the eschatological political sentiment in his poems from the 1930s and 1940s. What we must not miss is his adroit conflation of political (historical) upheaval and natural (mythical) upheaval. Consider the middle of the poem, after his description of Hitler "Wailing in Danzig, invoking destruction and wailing at it:"

Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon
A south wind like a blast from hell's mouth spilled a light rain
On the parched land, and at five a light earthquake
Danced the house, no harm done.

        Tonight I have been amusing myself
Watching the blood-red moon droop slowly
Into the black sea through bursts of dry lightning and distant thunder.
Well: the day is a poem: but too much
Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens,
Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

15.    To state that the day and the poem are analogous begs the question of narrativity, or narrative methodology. The narrative methodology of the Book of Revelation is as crucial to apocalypticism as the element of disaster or the linear progression of time. We often overlook the role and the import of the narrator in apocalypticism. It is important to distinguish between the narrator and the author in the Judeo-Christian version of apocalypse. The author is assumed to be God--but God must have a narrator--one who can deliver His word. ³ The word of God is, in the Book of Revelation, a promise of what will happen in the future based on the world's current circumstance (which is, in the Book of Revelation, a poor one). The apocalyptic narrator, then, must be a narrator who can occupy a unique position—a position that is both historical and ahistorical, a position at once inside and outside of time, a position from which she or he can simultaneously recall the past, report on the present, and warn of the future—or indeed, must report on the future as if it were the past.

16.    Taking such a narratorial stance can result in an unusual mixing of verb tenses, which we can see in both the Book of Revelation and in Jeffers's poem, "Shiva" (CP2:605). In the poem Jeffers uses various tenses to describe the actions of the hawk: she "is picking," "killed," "has taken," "is hunting"; she "loads" and she "is"; nothing "will escape" her, she "picks out the stars' eyes"; employing this variety of tenses, Jeffers reconfirms his role as apocalyptist, that is, as both reporter and seer. Because an apocalyptist recounts the future as if it were the past, s/he is almost forced to employ a variety of tenses. Consider Revelation 9:8-11:

Then the voice which I had heard from heaven spoke to me again,
saying "Go take the scroll which is open in the hand of the angel who
is standing on the sea and on the land." So I went to the angel and I told him
to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, "Take it and eat; it will be bitter
to your stomach, but as sweet as honey in your mouth." And I took the little
scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth,
but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter. And I was told,
"You must prophesy about many peoples and nations and tongues and kings."

17.    Such a narratorial positioning can lead to some intriguing narrative structures beyond the tense-mixing discussed above. The apocalyptist does recount the future as if it were the past, and above I called both St. John and Jeffers "seers," but Zamora makes an interesting distinction between prophecy and apocalypticism: "both prophecy and apocalypse look forward to the future, but the prophet sees the future as arising out of the present" (2) The present, for the apocalyptist, is a present of catastrophe and disaster—the apocalyptist is the one who sees, or rather, has seen, the intervention of good, good breaking into the present. The seer can only express his or her prescience, regardless of what that vision may be. The apocalyptist, on the other hand, is one who brings the future (good) into the present (evil). Both the seer and the apocalyptist narrate the future as if they have already witnessed it, but the seer does not construct a narrative wherein the future will alleviate the present as does the apocalyptist. This Jeffers does in "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones."

18.    In "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones" (CP3:407) Jeffers gives us his at once sophisticated and sentimental vision of a temporal evil and a future good. The poem opens with a typical Romantic moment ("the narrow cliffside trail," the "little cataract shaking the jeweled fern-fronds"), but this is interrupted when "a bad smell came up." Upon further investigation, the poet discovers a hidden glen, full of bones ("clean bones and stinking bones,/ Antlers and bones") and he then understands that "the place was a refuge for wounded deer: there are so many / Hurt ones escape the hunters and limp away to lie hidden; here they have water for the awful thirst /And a place to die in ." What we first perceive as a beautiful, untainted setting, then, proves to be a haven for evil. If we keep in mind Jeffers' poem "Orca" (CP3:205) in which he considers the death the great sharks inflict upon the sea lions "clean and bright... beautiful. ..Because there was nothing human involved, suffering nor causing; no lies, no smirk and no malice" then we can see how the deer's deaths--- unclean deaths, the suffering deaths, caused by human hands would be for Jeffers an evil indeed. The glen is an evil place because it is not one of natural death for the deer—like an elephant graveyard but rather where they suffer the evil of the hunters who do not kill them cleanly.

19.    The poet feels great sympathy for the deer, perhaps even empathy: "I wish my bones were with theirs," he says. He immediately admits, however, that "that's a foolish thing to confess and a little cowardly." Ultimately, he reiterates his "own thirty-year-old-decision: who drinks the wine/ Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment/ New discovery may lie." It would be easy to make the new-life-out-of-stinging-death interpretation here, to make a simplistic connection and a contextual connection between decadence and fecundity, but I would rather argue that it is the poet who is the good breaking into the evil present of the carcass-strewn glen. Evil here personified by the hunters is in control at the present moment, but the poet, stumbling across the glen, represents good breaking into that present. The poet represents good not just because he abhors the bones and death in the glen, but also because he then writes the poem, or, adopts the narrative stance of the apocalyptist who writes (narrates) by looking at once forward and back. The poem closes, "The deer in that beautiful place lay down their bones: I must wear mine," which evidences Jeffers's understanding that the apocalyptist cannot change or eradicate the temporal evil, but only write it. And by writing it, as I argue, the apocalyptist breaks good into the present evil. The poem, "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones," is in fact the future of the hidden glen, and the poet's narration of the scene is that by which he breaks good into the present evil.

20.    When we consider apocalypticism in terms of narrative methodology, we begin to see that is an incomplete and incompletable project, centered on the production of text itself. It isn't the story that the text tells; rather it is in the telling that knowledge or truth might be found. When Jacques Derrida argues in "No Apocalypse, Not Now" that the threat of a "nuclear dispensation" must be rendered impossible because it will eradicate the archive of human knowledge (26), he is in effect arguing tautologically: without narration, there is no apocalypse—not now, not ever because "the apocalypse" is the story we tell to forestall the end. The final destruction of the world is something truly beyond our comprehension, but the story of that destruction is not—and, Scheherazade-like, we continue to tell it as if to stave off our own deaths. There is an element in every apocalypse of "no, not yet," and it is there through and because of the narrator. In Writing the Apocalypse Zamora tells us that apocalyptists often have "an almost obsessive fascination with narrative endings. Paradoxically, this fascination with endings often manifests itself in elaborate strategies for their subversion or negation. Apocalypse thus becomes (for some apocalyptists) a formal question rather than a philosophical one" (5). Nor is true apocalyptic literature meant to be predictive. It is not that the world will end 150 years after discovery of the New World, as Columbus, working off the figures of Joachim de Fiore, thought, or that it will be either December 31^st, 1999, or December 31^st, 2000 as some current and confused doomsayers cry. For the symbols, allusions, and imagery of apocalypse are not "literal expressions of events in time and space" (Tillich in O'Leary 220). Rather, as O'Leary puts it, Apocalyse offers not a prediction of history's final conclusion,
but a narrative representation of an End that remains an ethical ground for judgment though it is not in principle attainable within history. In this reading, the proper answer to the question, 'When will the Last Judgment occur?" (is an answer which) can prevent the Apocalypse from being rendered irrelevant and thereby preserve its ultimate significance. The proper reply to the question, then, is 'It has already occurred; it is always about to occur; it is here now and always has been.' (O'Leary, 220). O'Leary's presentation of the insignificance of prediction points to the greater significance of the practice of narration, the telling of that which "has already occurred…is always about to occur…is here now and always has been."

21.    It is not it is never that there is an answer, an exact when for the moment of the radical break. This Jeffers realizes in his ironically titled poem "The Answer" (CP:536). The answer, he tells us, is "not to be deluded by dreams./ To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before." He alludes here to the eschatology of civilization, and gives us a hint of the past/present/futureness of this knowledge in the tense confusion of "their tyrants come, many times before." He located us historically, but then takes a mythic stance to tell us that "evils are essential," and when they come he reminds us that we should "not be duped/ By dreams of universal justice or happiness" and to "know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful." The necessity of evil is here reiterated, as well as recognized as temporally present, but good also begins to break its way into the poem. "Integrity is wholeness," he tells us, "the greatest beauty is /Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. " If we can realize that we cannot separate things out from the organic whole, if we can "Love that, not man/ Apart from that" we can avoid, to paraphrase, drowning in despair when the days do darken.

22.    Darkening days are again an apocalyptic image, but in "The Answer" Jeffers is more a formal apocalyptist than an imagist one. A formal apocalyptist is one who, as Zamora tells us, presents "dilemmas which (he) cannot, and do(es) not want to resolve: (he) believe(s) neither in answers nor in endings" (WTA,5). The answer proposed in "The Answer" is that there must not be a "final solution;" that apocalypticism is not about the prediction of Armageddon but the narration of the ethic of avoiding it.

23.    In our own century we have approached cataclysmic endings and final solutions in both the Nazi and nuclear holocausts, both of which horrified Jeffers. But Jeffers never took the horrors of World War II as predictive images of the end of the world. As an apocalyptist (and not a seer) he knows the folly of prophecy, a point which he makes in 'Cassandra" (CP 3: 121). Jeffers knows that the madding crowd would prefer prediction simple, succinct, graspable. But he knows as well the difficulties inherent in prophecy:

Truly men hate the truth; they'd liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion
Venders and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kindly
Wisdom.

24.    Certainly Jeffers is not opposed to employing the cataclysmic imagery of the Book of Revelation, but he also uses the narrative methodology of the apocalyptist. Because he does his poetry becomes something other than a reimagining of the horrors of the twentieth century in terms of the Book of Revelation. Both supermarket tabloids and some well-respected literature assume that the ideas and images of Armageddon a comet or two, three sixes spray-painted on a subway car's exterior- are all it takes to be considered apocalyptic. I have argued in this essay that there is another component of apocalypticism the narrative methodology inherent in the Book of Revelation. The truly apocalyptic work is that which, by the act of narration, breaks future good into the present evil, and as such, it is the narration of ethics. Contemporaneous critics of Robinson Jeffers who noticed the "violence and horror" of the poems, or the "lurid violence perpetrated by the characters of the poems," who believed that Jeffers "felt compelled to add more than his quota of hatred and violence abroad in the world," were as misdirected as those who read into every comet and earthquake the end of the world, such as the Hal Lindseys of the world who coin phrases like "nuclear dispensationalism." Near the end of the Book of Revelation, St. John writes, "The spirit and the Bride say 'Come.' And let him who hears say 'Come.'" (Rev.22:17). The invitation is into the new earthly paradise, but the larger implication of these two simple sentences is the invitation into the narrative process. The true apocalyptist, like Jeffers, realizes that the promise and the responsibility of the Book of Revelation is that we must continue the ethic of narration. By the practice of narration, we break good into evil, and when we do so, we can realize the new earthly paradise.

1.    The Book of Revelation opens with the following brief "explanation" of its own existence: "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw" (Rev 1: 1-2). It seems clear that God is both the originator of the words and the deeds that are to follow (and this would be consistent with Genesis wherein God speaks and creation ensues). It seems equally clear by the first verse of Revelation that God as author still needs a human being as narrator in terms of Roland Barthe's distinction, in "Authors with Writers," between an author and a writer; "the author's language is an intransitive act... the writer's an activity" (190). Barthe's use of the word "intransitive" is grammatical; he means as in intransitive verbs, those verbs which do not take a direct object. We could think of God as an intransitive verb: that which is without need of a direct object, that which is its own construction. It is not that difficult, then to see that God as author would need a writer, or in my terminology, a narrator--one who's language is "an activity," a language that takes action, one who's language acts upon his or her listeners.

2.    Zakai's point is that Puritan emigrants to the New World used an Exodus-model for their emigration, as opposed to the Spanish explorers who used a Genesis-model to rationalize their conquest of the New World. As Zakai writes:

Puritan eschatology and apocalypse of the New World constituted a radical and revolutionary departure from previous European attempts to incorporate America as a sacred space within the confines of ecclesiastical history. Having failed to execute the true reformation in England, Puritans turned their gaze on the New World. Their experience in England, the experience of failure, was radically different from that of the Catholics in Spain and Protestants in England who sought to transport to America the glorious religious cultures of their own countries. Puritans on the contrary sought to create in America that which had been denied them back home. Inevitably…the Puritan eschatology and apocalypse of American were not based upon the Genesis type of religious migration, as was the case with Spain, Portugal, and Protestant England, but rather upon the Exodus type of religious migration, a judgmental, apocalyptic migration based upon the ultimate rejection of, and total separation from, what was seen as corrupted history and degenerating human traditions " (10).

We can see the Genesis-model at work in Columbus's Edenic description of the New World in his "Letter to the Sovereigns on his First Voyage." Columbus's description betrays the beginnings of an idea that will become pervasive for him, and for many of the Spanish and Portuguese explorers who followed him: that this New World was the geographical location of the original Garden of Eden, and that as Christians, it was rightfully theirs to conquer and convert. We can see the Exodus-model at work in Mary Rowlandson's Narrative, if we read her trials and tribulations in the wilderness as an analogy for the Puritan community at large. As Zakai reminds us, "the pilgrimage through the wilderness (is) a necessary condition in order to reach the New Jerusalem" (148). The Puritan emigrants to the New World did not see that New World as the original geographical location of the Garden of Eden, but as the place whereat to build the New Jerusalem-- Winthrop's "city on a hill"--thus theirs is an emigration modeled on the Book of Exodus. But the New World figured apocalypticaly in either model in that the end result is a new earthly paradise, as promised in the Book of Revelation. And while the apocalypticism of the Puritans and the Spanish was for them a religious text, it has become for us a cultural legacy. Whether or not an American considers him/herself a religious descendent of those original Europeans, we are all, in the end, their cultural descendants to the extent that we live in a culture that remains influenced by the apocalypticism they brought with them from Europe.

3.    It is important to reiterate here the point of linear vs. cyclical time. While most critics see Jeffers's concept of time as cyclical, in that they see it as natural, following the pattern of birth and death, I would like to argue that in the poems that we can consider apocalyptic, like "Shiva," time proceeds in a more linear fashion than a cyclical one. Lawrence Clark Powell writes that "Robinson Jeffers sees dispassionately that the little black beetle on the tor and the bright star Betelegeuse share the common destiny of having a life cycle of birth and death to fulfill. Earth will shed its burden of life, then dissolve in time; the sun will burn to death, galaxy after galaxy will scatter to pieces; and probably there is no end to the stellar births that make continuous the system" (169), and I do not argue that we can see this kind of continuous time at work in much of Jeffers's poetry. But in apocalypticism, and in Jeffers's work that we can consider apocalyptic, time is not continuous. There is a final end point, a rupture, after which a new time begins. Apocalypticism does not concern itself with rebirth, but with a new beginning. In "Shiva," the example at hand, the hawk will "hatch a new brood, / Hang new heavens with new birds, " and it is my argument that this is more apocalyptic, and hence linear, than cyclical. Even though the poem ends with "all be renewed," knowing Jeffers's thoughts of contemporaneous culture and civilization, I think it is plausible to argue that he does not call for rebirth – that is to say, simply another batch of the same old birds. He calls instead for entirely new birds, a new civilization and culture, the old one having been wiped from the face of the earth by the forces of Armageddon, in whatever form those forces might come.

Barthes, Roland. "Authors and Writers." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. 185-195.

Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Revised and Enlarged Edition. New York: Oxford U P, 1970.

Cox, Wayne. "Robinson Jeffers and the Conflict of Christianity." Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers: Essays in Honor of William H. Nolte. Ed. William B. Thesig. Columbia, S. C.: U. of South Carolina P, 1995. 122-135.

Derrida, Jacques. "No Apocalypse, Not now: Full Speed Ahead. Seven Missles, Seven missives." Diacritics. Summer, 1984. 20-31.

Everson, William. Forward. The Double Axe. By Robinson Jeffers. London: Liveright, 1977. vii-xx.
     (Brother Antonius. Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury. Oyez, 1968.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. 3 vols. Palo Alto, CA.: Stanford U P, 1989.
     "To Rudolph Gilbert." November, 1929. Letter 169 of The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Ann N. Ridgeway. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins P, 1968. 159-60.

O'Leary, Stephen D. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Pasadena: San Pasqual Press, 1940.

Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia U P, 1961.

Zakai, Avihu. Exile and Kingdom: History and Apocalypse in the Puritan Migration to America. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1992.

Zamora, Lois Parkinson. Introduction. The Apocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture. Bowling Green, OH.: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1982. 1-10.
     Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U. S. and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1989.

ShaunAnne Tangney is an assistant professor of English at Minot State University in North Dakota. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nevada at Reno, where she wrote her dissertation on apocalyptic American literature, titled "Children of the Word: from Image to Method in Apocalyptic American Literature." She has been a member of the RJA for five years and has given papers on Jeffers at RJA and ALA. Ms. Tangney is also a poet, published in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, and soon to be published in English and French translation, in France.