Volume 2, Number 4

Emerson, Whitman, and Jeffers: The Prophetic Charge of the Poet in the Unity of the World
by Kathleen Mackin

Men walk as prophecies of the next age

                                        --Emerson, “Circles”

1.    When reading two poets in tandem, or against one another, as we might do with Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, the temptation is strong to seek a cause/effect relationship, that is, to examine the influence of the earlier upon the later. In this instance, the superficial similarity of the poets’ styles, along with their apparently opposing philosophical world outlooks, makes the question particularly intriguing. Yet James Karman’s fine critical biography Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California makes no mention of Walt Whitman, and in other discussions of Jeffers’s work, reference to Whitman is fleeting at best. Perhaps William White said all there was to say on the subject in 1969 in his brief note in Serif when he turned to Jeffers himself for guidance; reviewing the recently published Selected Letters, he observed that in them Jeffers referred to Whitman only twice. For White, the telling comment appeared in a postscript to a 1933 letter addressed to Jeremy Ingalls, who had inquired about Jeffers’s literary influences: “Poe captured me when I was very young; I had almost forgotten. Emerson interested me; Whitman never did” (33).

2.    However, for a critic to pack up his bags and go home on the basis of such a comment surely is short-sighted. We need not quarrel with Jeffers and insist on an influence that may in fact be illusory at best. However, neither need we conclude that the two poets are “virtual opposites” (Hrubesky). Rather, we might follow the hint that Jeffers provides in his remark, “Emerson interested me.” The literary relationship between Emerson and Whitman is well known; Whitman’s adoption of the Emersonian ideal of the poet is a fundamental starting point in Whitman studies.¹ Although Jeffers never made such an overt claim for himself, his absorption of Emerson’s ideals and theory was apparently profound. Writing to Frederic Ives Carpenter in 1933, Jeffers observed, “You ask what I think of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville. I am ashamed to say that I never read anything of Thoreau’s; I like to think of his life, though it was rather specialist. Emerson was a youthful enthusiasm, if you like, but not outgrown by any means, only read so thoroughly that I have not returned to him for a long time” (Letters 209).²

3.    What lessons, then, did these two ambitious poets learn from Emerson? And how might an exploration of that question enable us to better assess the relationship between them? This paper begins with an examination of the qualities Emerson called for in his conceptualization of the (uniquely American) poet, while also presenting the “poet” as both Whitman and Jeffers called for him or defined him in their verses. The role of the poet as prophet or visionary, that is, the role of the poet in or before his time, leads us to a consideration of the philosophical world views held by each of these writers. The question of the existence of a unity of nature, man, and God prompts a comparison of Emerson’s early philosophy with Whitman’s philosophy, followed by a comparison of Emerson’s later essays with Jeffers’s philosophy of Inhumanism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the possibilities of comparing the poets to one another.

Three poets on the idea of “the Poet”

4.    In his address “The American Scholar,” Emerson boldly asserts,

Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the polestar for a thousand years? (45)

5.    Implicit in such a claim is the necessary importance of the figure of the poet himself, of whom Emerson writes,

The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart. (305)

5.    The suggestive figure here is perhaps of the poet as prism, but it is a prism capable of both refracting a single source and synthesizing multiple stimuli. Thus, the poet is more finely attuned to that which other men might only sense or imperfectly know. Referring to Whitman’s 1855 comment that Emerson “brought him to a boil,” Marr observes, “And when Whitman ‘boiled,’ he created the most expansive character in American literature and the epitome of Emersonian privatism: the speaker in ‘Song of Myself’” (37). That speaker personifies his mission in these lines which share Emerson’s sense of “receive and impart”:

And I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. (ll. 403-5)

6.    Here is a speaker then, who, before “imparting” to other men, is first a reader of the world around him. That very process of reading requires an act of translation, a translation of experience and knowledge into words. Whitman acknowledges the potentially inherent contradiction of such an act when he says, “My words are words of a questioning, and to indicate reality” (l. 994). He implies an act of discovery through naming, which complements Emerson’s claim that “the poet is the Namer or Language-maker” (313). Thus Whitman describes his own charge as taking place among an

Endless unfolding of words of ages!
And mine a word of the modern. . . . a word en masse.

A word of the faith that never balks,
One time as good as another time. . . . here or henceforward it is
all the same to me.

A word of reality . . . . materialism first and last embueing.
(ll. 483-487, ellipses Whitman’s)

7.    Here he is also commenting on his role as a speaker for his own time, the “modern.” As Emerson observed, “For the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet” (“The Poet” 307). Whitman acknowledges as much in “Poets to Come” when he says, “I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, / I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness” (11). The poet as prophet foretells his own successor. However, this ingenuous comment does nothing to diminish the claims of the speaker of “Song of Myself,” who, though he may be “untranslatable” (l. 1234), nevertheless performs, through his sympathetic participation in the life of the world, the function of translation for other men.

8.    For Jeffers, the act of imparting was preceded by an act not of reading but of listening (although the underlying acts themselves seem not dissimilar). In “Let Them Alone,” he emphasizes that act by exhorting the public to listen to the poet, that is, to he himself who listens:

If God has been good enough to give you a poet
Then listen to him. But for God’s sake let him alone until he is dead . . .
            . . . A poet is one who listens
To nature and his own heart . . . (CP 3:427)

9.    Like Emerson and Whitman, Jeffers emphasized the necessity of the experiential in determining the expressive, claiming in “The Beauty of Things”:

                            . . . -- to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments,
the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason. (CP 3:369)

10.    Here, he insists on the ability of the poet to perform as Emerson calls for him to do:

For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that
makes things ugly, the poet, who reattaches things to nature and
the Whole -- re-attaching even artificial things and violation of
nature, to nature, by a deeper insight -- disposes very easily of
the most disagreeable facts. (312).³

11.    However, such an accomplishment is hard won. In a brief untitled lyric, Jeffers encapsulates the struggle in which the poet is engaged in his effort to translate for others his knowledge of the world:

Eagle and hawk with their great claws and hooked heads
Tear life to pieces; vulture and raven wait for death to soften it.
The poet cannot feed on this time of the world
Until he has torn it to pieces, and himself also. (CP 3.445)

12.    In his poetry, Jeffers performs this tearing of life to pieces; in contrast, Whitman, in his naming, listing, and cataloguing, performs the reassembling of the pieces into a whole. As Clarke writes of Whitman’s poetic persona in “Song of Myself,” “It is an American self: an imagined unity of being and expectation. Its prophecy, in the end, is that it speaks for all Americans and all Americas” (80). This idea of speaking for, or on behalf of men, what they themselves cannot speak is central to Emerson’s charge, and in his essay “Nature” (from the Second Series) he emphasizes the fact of the poet as the one who does speak: “The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken” (400). However, for both Whitman and Jeffers, the charge of being the one to speak is problematic.

13.    For Whitman, the central problem inheres within language and its limitations as a vehicle of expression. Consequently, he is able to figure his poet specifically as one who is not bound by language for expression; in fact, as he who does not speak: “Writing and talk do not prove me, / I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face, / With the hush of my lips I confound the topmost skeptic” (“Song of Myself” ll. 581-3). Such an act complements its opposite, “I / . . . know my omnivorous words, and cannot say any less” (ll. 991-2). Thus, the poet can and will speak but is not limited to speech for expression.

14.    Jeffers reveals no mistrust of language. The question was not one of to speak or not to speak, for he clearly was compelled to do so; rather, for him the complicating factor was his audience. He accosts the dismissive reader of “So Many Blood Lakes,” “As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. It is a fool- / ish business to see the future and screech at it. / One should watch and not speak” (CP 3:133). Not infrequently he aligns himself with Cassandra, the prophetess fated never to be believed (a character Jeffers dramatized in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy”). It is perhaps with respect to this role of the poet as prophet that Whitman’s and Jeffers’s notions of “the poet” most radically depart from each other.

Poet as Prophet

15.    Emerson’s sense of the poet’s role in this respect is not entirely consistent. Above, he casually aligned them, as in “the poet, the prophet.” At other times, the question of priority and consequence is more complicated:

For poetry was all written before time was . . . The sign and
credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no man
foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he
is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the
appearance which he describes. (306)

16.    Here the poet is simultaneously contemporaneous with that “which he describes” and subsequent to it (since “poetry was all written before time was”). Commenting on this passage, Clarke writes, “The poet, is, thus, Olympian, a bard of prophecy who returns us to an original condition . . . To speak is, then, a part of a larger prophetic power unique to the poet -- and the poet assumes a singular position within the culture . . . for the poet when speaking is not himself . . . but an inspired being” (82-3).

17.    For Kuebrich, with respect to Whitman, this prophetic function operates primarily in a religious context. Regretting an “academic criticism [which has] lost sight of the prophetic purpose that constitutes the heart of Whitman’s lifelong poetic effort,” Kuebrich recovers that prophetic impulse in the following terms:

Whitman did want to begin a new religion. He wanted his poetry to
serve two functions: to promote the spiritual development of his
readers and to provide them with a coherent vision which would
integrate their religious experience with the dominant modes of
modern thought and action -- science, technology, and democracy. (2)

18.    Whitman’s ambition is served well, then, by Emerson’s essays which “provid[ed] not only a cogently reasoned version of the Romantic religious world view but also a definition of the poet as religious prophet . . . ” (Kuebrich 13-14). Whitman’s own assertions, though large, rarely aspire to this height; the persuasiveness of Kuebrich’s argument lies in the performance of the poetry rather than its explicit claims. We might better perceive Whitman as a visionary than a prophet: the foreteller of a possible future, which the poet perceives and attempts to make manifest. In his role as “representative man” Whitman facilitates the voice of his fellow man:

It is you talking just as much as myself . . . I act as the tongue of you,
It was tied in your mouth. . . . in mine it begins to be loosened. (ll. 1156-7)

19.    In his song he offers a celebration of man in and of the world with which he hopes to direct others. However, the ultimate responsibility for man’s actions lies outside the purview of the poet. “Not I, nor any one else can travel that road for you,” he observes, “You must travel it for yourself” (ll. 1119-20).

20.    In contrast, Jeffers as prophet is nearly a commonplace among the critics. As early as 1936 Gilbert wrote of him, “Jeffers’s poetic conceptions are typical of prophets imbued with a mastering sense of their mission. . . . He is prophetic; he sees beyond the bounds of humanity into the future” (34). This notion of a future which extends beyond human existence is an impossibility in Whitman’s humanistic vision. However, the difference between the two poets is one of tone as well as content. Echoing Emerson’s description of the persistent voice of the poet-prophet, Bowers described Jeffers as having “the voice of prophecy [which] insists on being heard and understood. . . . In Jeffers we hear an apocalyptic boom, the voice of expiration, as language extends toward its own inevitable exhaustion in a final silence” (13). Here is not the selective, effective silence of Whitman’s persona, but the spent silence of a voice which can no longer speak.

21.    Yet it is a “silence” more figurative than actual, perhaps only created by the reader who stops listening. Jeffers’s beliefs continued to find expression in his poetry late into the poet’s life, long after anything resembling a wide readership was apparent. His despair and desire to abandon the project are evident in lines such as these from “Meditation on Saviors”:

                            . . . Am I another keeper of the people, that on my own shore,
On the gray rock, by the grooved mass of the ocean, the sick-nesses I left behind me concern me? (CP 1.398)

22.    Those “sicknesses” do, of course, continue to concern him. Zaller summarizes the trajectory of Jeffers’s poetry:

Prophecy, preservation, discovery, acceptance: These were the
stages not of a journey whose goal was some definitive act of
transcendence but of a dialogue that, like the historical process
it addressed, renewed and repeated itself in time. . . . Like the
prophet, he was always compelled to speak anew. (217)

23.    Whitman and Jeffers shared a compulsion to articulate their sense of man’s future. They perhaps differed as to the inevitableness of their respective visions. What joins them is an understanding of a unity of the world, a belief which appears to find its source in Emerson, who in “The Over-Soul” writes,

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and
the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in
which we rest as the earth has in the soft arms of the atmosphere;
that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular
being is contained and made one with all other. . . . (216)

24.    Walt Whitman exploits this collapse in his “Earth, My Likeness”, in which the speaker’s emotional state (one of desire which has a physical source in his lover) provides him with an understanding of an underlying force within the earth itself. That the force is “fierce” the speaker knows because his own experience of it is as “something fierce and terrible” (110). Significantly, the knowledge comes from an emotional sympathy or identification. Visually, the earth is “impassive, ample and spheric,” betraying nothing of what the poet knows to exist behind the surface.

25.    A more literal rendering of Emerson’s portrait of the unity of man, nature, and God (which in “The Poet” he sums up in the statement that “The Universe is the externalization of the soul” [310]) can be found in Whitman’s “Kosmos.” Here, a series of appositives depicts a cosmos which ultimately “. . . sees races, eras, dates, generations, / The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together” (328-9). Whitman’s poem fuses time and space as well as material and spiritual entities. However, what is striking about the poem is the similarity between his presentation of these attributes and similar characterizations, both in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and in Emerson’s “The American Scholar” or “The Poet” where they form depictions of the poet. Thus the substitution of cosmos for poet emphasizes the merge of the two that the writers envision. Characterizing “Nature” as speaking “under the authority of a humanist prejudice,” Jacobson says, “The early synthesis in Nature is characterized by Emerson’s belief that the individual can will nature’s disclosure” (12). He elaborates, “Man is the creator in finite, and for that reason his authentic utterances speak the universal sense of nature” (18). This idea may find its most succinct form in Emerson’s comment, “What is man but nature’s finer success in self-explication?” (290).

26.    The impulse to self-knowledge, then, is one and the same as the impulse to an understanding of the external world. Emerson captures the enthusiasm of this investigation when he writes,

. . . -- in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render
account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. . . . But
what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are
not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a
law of the human mind? (47)

27.    Thus the act of classification serves the larger purpose of comprehending “generalization” which “is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it” (267). Jeffers’s “Monument” reflects the same belief in a unity which can only be apprehended as a whole:

Erase the lines; I pray you not to love classifications:
The thing is like a river, from source to sea-mouth
One flowing life. We that have the honor and hardship of being human
Are one flesh with the beasts, and the beasts with the plants
One streaming sap, and certainly the plants and algae and the earth they spring from,
Are one flesh with the stars. (CP 3:419)

28.    However, even as early as in “Nature,” Emerson was providing evidence of the shift that his philosophy would take in some of his later writings when he observes,

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is
a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in
the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important
respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will.
Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us,
the present expositor of the divine mind. (36).

In this passage we find that man’s participation in the Unity does not necessarily endow him with the capacity to determine it in any way; man’s perception of his ability and role changes. Jacobson terms this movement a “turn to anti-humanism” and notes that it “reflects a change in Emerson’s sense of our ability to own our legislative capacity in nature, not a rejection of that capacity” (20-1). In Jacobson’s view, the significant change is one of consciousness.

In his work, Jeffers reaches the identical conclusion. Hunt writes,

For Jeffers consciousness figures as both a kind of redemption and
a kind of damnation -- perhaps more a redemption intertwined with
a damnation. It awakens us to nature’s beauty and gives us the
power to identify with and participate in its transcendence. But
this identification -- and the transcendence -- is always partial
and temporary since consciousness is also self-awareness. (68).

Brasher best defines the distinction between Emerson and Jeffers on this point:

Man’s consciousness gives him domain over the natural world in
Emerson’s mind, but Jeffers sees man’s unique mind as a physical
occurrence, that, though providing him with an unrivalled
awareness of the natural world, does not finally elevate him above
it. (151)

29.    Whereas Whitman pursued Emerson’s early vision of a soul which contained a merged man and world, Jeffers directs his attention to Emerson’s later understanding of a man of variable consciousness of his relation to that world. Emerson, Whitman, and Jeffers share an abiding concern in the individual man, even (or especially) as they see him as part of a larger whole. Where they differ most dramatically is in the style of their address to their fellow man. Emerson is content to observe and remark, leaving it to others to act on the lessons they acquire from his insight. Whitman holds the image of a possible world before his reader and, through song and celebration, insists on his reader’s participation in the vision. Jeffers rages at all which detracts from “the great humaneness at the heart of things” ("The Excesses of God," Poems 72). Because their philosophies differ in the details more so than in the intent, they can profitably be read together. The result is a further example of “variety in unity” -- the various renderings of a common goal.

Postscript

Emerson might have been prophesying Jeffers’s life work when he wrote,

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many
ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that
which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that
built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and
nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and
thus, ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which,
being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause.
Everything looks permanent until its secret is known. (264)

Although Jeffers, the “Stone-Mason of Tor House,” preferred to imagine that his Hawk Tower would outlive mankind itself, he acknowledged Emerson’s insight when he wrote in a late untitled lyric,

                    . . . Only the little tower,
Four-foot-thick-walled and useless may stand for a time.
That and some verses. It is curious that flower-soft verse
Is sometimes harder than granite, tougher than a steel
            cable, more alive than life. (CP 3.477)

End Notes
¹     But see Kuebrich’s claim that Whitman’s understanding of a religious cosmology, at least, predates Emerson’s influence on him (13).

²     See Alan Brasher’s “‘Their Beauty Has More Meaning’ : Transcendental Echoes in Jeffers’s Inhumanist Philosophy of Nature” for a persuasive argument that despite the apparent lack of direct influence, Jeffers has more in common with Thoreau than with Emerson.

³     Jeffers’s long narrative poems, dismissed by many critics for their graphic sexuality and violence, take on new meaning when read in light of this charge. See, among others, Tim Hunt.

⁴     Jeffers is likely to have conceived of “permanence” differently from Emerson, who was able to write of it, “Permanence is but a word of degrees” (“Circles” 264).

Works Cited

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Brasher, Alan. “‘Their Beauty Has More Meaning’: Transcendental Echoes in Jeffers’s Inhumanist Philosophy of Nature.” Thesing 146-159.

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Falck, Colin. “Robinson Jeffers: American Romantic?” Thesing 83-92.

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Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The Collected Poems of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. New York: Book League of America, 1942.
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