The Poet as Prophet:

Some Notes on Robinson Jeffers

John Haines

(Vol 4, Nr 1)

Editors’ note: Adapted from the Keynote Address, Robinson Jeffers Association Conference, Carmel, California, February 2000.

1.  Robinson Jeffers has long been one of my models in poetry, someone whose work I discovered at a fairly early age when I was just beginning to write seriously; he remains one of my lasting affections among modern poets. I don’t pretend to speak in what follows as a scholar, one whose research empowers him to speak at length of Jeffers and in critical detail. I speak as a poet, one who has learned from Jeffers, as from many other poets, what the art at its best can be. I might say also that it would not be easy for me to speak of poetry, of Jeffers and his work, and avoid reference to this turn of the century and the prospects before us.

2.  In considering what I might say of Jeffers at this time, and not avoid the stated theme of the conference, which is Jeffers and Apocalypse, I’ve been drawn to a consideration of the poet as he appears in past literature as speaker to the people, whether as prophet in the classical, or biblical sense, or as dramatist of humanity’s eternal struggle with the gods, with Nature, as well as with our human nature.

3.  Whatever else I may have to say, there is little doubt in my mind that Jeffers is among the foremost of our modern poets, rare in any age and in ours an outstanding figure. His dismissal by one of our Ivy League critics as “a West Coast nature poet” is not only a failure of critical judgment, but a kind of East Coast snobbery and an insult. And if any writer of our time can be said to embody in his work the theme of apocalypse, it is he.

4.  Precisely when I first encountered Jeffers’s work I cannot say, but I do recall reading him during my first year as a student in New York in 1950–51. I recall also that he was being read by some of the young people I knew then, and I think his work was generally a part of the literary culture of the time. Having finished with my art studies in 1952, my first wife and I moved west to Monterey, drawn there mainly by Jeffers’s example, to Carmel Valley, Big Sur, and the surrounding country. The valley, the coastline, were for us suffused with Jeffers and his writing, his poems and verse dramas.

5.  Although my initial venture to Alaska after WW II had nothing directly to do with Jeffers (I had not read him, nor even heard of him), it does seem likely that his example lay in the back of my mind when I returned to the Richardson Homestead in 1954. I had then no program, no Hawk Tower to build, only an instinct as to what I wanted and needed to do—a vision, so to speak, requiring many years to clarify. Meanwhile, a life to live and work to do.

6.  To what extent Jeffers influenced my own writing at an early stage would be hard to say now, though I sense in a few of my poems from the early 1950s something of his voice and verse style. One thing I can testify to is the force of his example, of his convictions and his stating of them. Here, for me at the time, was a poet who would speak openly and honestly on history, on politics and public life, and with no apparent regard as to the consequences. This was for me a lesson, one I did not forget, though my writing has steered far afield from the example offered by Jeffers, moving stylistically in other directions under the influence of very different poets, like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. C. Williams, as well as numerous poets in other languages.

7.  What concerns me most immediately at this moment is the voice of the poet as prophet and teacher; the poet as social critic, as speaker to the people. And what I find so consistent in Jeffers’s work, from beginning to end, is that prophetic note which can on occasion become monotonous, perhaps repetitious, but which also embodies a truth of our times to be found nowhere else.

8.  There is that voice, in literature, in the classics, in the Bible—a passion, if you will, that empowers the text and makes of it something more than a passing amusement, and mainly to be found in poetry, in verse, but also at times in certain works of fiction, and I would mention here as one prominent and neglected example, the German writer, Hermann Broch, and his major novels, The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil.

9.  What may be essential, and which is largely missing in poetry today, is that historical and philosophical perspective, to be gained mainly from a familiar-ity with the classics. I know that my own recent rereading of Greek and Roman history and literature has sharpened my sense of where we are at this moment in our history, teetering, as it were, between a faltering democracy and a kind of corporate imperialism. We have yet to see the outcome, but can perhaps admit the premonitions.
It is true of the classics, of all ancient texts and tales, that they embody the lasting truths of our human condition. To the extent that contemporary literature and art acknowledge this and learn from it, our poems and stories may survive the current market. I refer to that larger theme, so conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry. And it may be that in our modern era the proliferation of the public media has deprived the art of poetry of its older audience, and also of its ancient voice, that which speaks to us all.

10.  To speak the truth as we see it: nothing else can justify our claims to art, and the art of poetry. As Jeffers once put it, “I can tell lies in prose.” Yet even there, in our prose criticism, we are bound to truth, and I cannot imagine Jeffers lying even in prose! Indeed, his one major critical essay, “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” demonstrates his need to speak directly and honestly. The gravity, the solemn authority in Jeffers’s verse and prose—a quality that has all but disappeared from American writing:

Therefore though not forgotten not loved, in gray old years in the evening leaning
Over the gray stones of the tower-top,
You shall be called heartless and blind;
And watch new time answer old thought, not a face strange nor a pain astonishing . . .
(“Soliloquy,” CP 1:215)

We live in a world created by applied science, and our present is unlike the present of any other age . . . Applied science shows us a world of consistent mechanical progress . . . machines give birth to ever new generations of machines, and the new machines are always better and more efficient than the old, and begin where the old left off . . . But in the world of human beings all is different; there we find no mechanical progress . . . Every human being has to begin at the beginning . . . with the same difficulties and pleasures, the same temptations, the same problems of good and evil, the same inward   conflict, the same need to learn how to live, the same inclination to ask what life means. (Essays on Literature and Society, 226)

The nineteenth century thought that machinery was a moral force and would make men better. How could the steam-engine make men better? . . . If I look back over the last hundred years it seems to me that we have lost more than we have gained . . . that what we have gained is trifling, for what we have lost was old and what we have gained is merely new. The world might have settled down into a passable Utopia by now if it had not been for “progress.” (The Story and the Fable, 257)

Man, introverted man . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Has begot giants; but being taken up
Like a maniac with self-love and inward conflicts cannot manage his hybrids.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Now he’s bred knives on nature turns them also inward . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
. . . who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much? (CP 1:113)

“. . . in spite of our machines, the habits of the human heart remain what they have always been, and imagination deals with them as no other faculty can” (227).

On our long flight over the Atlantic
the already drunk were served
again and again their two little bottles
of Scotch or vodka or whatever else
they wanted—soon followed by another
pair, and another—such cute miniatures
that I wanted to save the bottles for children,
and in fact tucked away a couple
for that purpose, and one to use later
for shaving lotion . . .

Dad pushed my mother down the cellar stairs.
Gram had me name each plant in her garden.
My father got drunk. Ma went to country fairs.
The pet chameleon we had was warden
of the living room curtains where us kids
stood waiting for their headlights to turn in.
Let us compare these lines with some sample passages from Jeffers:

Peace is the heir of dead desire,
Whether abundance killed the cormorant
In a happy hour, or sleep or death
Drowned him deep in dreamy waters,
Peace is the ashes of that fire,
The heir of that king, the inn of that journey. (“Suicide’s Stone,” CP 4:115)

The tide, moving the night’s
Vastness with lonely voices,
Turns, the deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength
To the outmost margins: you Night will resume
The stars in your time. (“Night,” CP 1:115)

18.  And then, with Jeffers, an underlying cadence learned from an early study of classical poetry; a solemnity that comes from attention to the world at large, to our natural and historical background; a verse grounded in that eternal reality on which human life has always been grounded. Or, perhaps we can say: it is the difference between poetry in the true sense of the word, and a sort of pastime imitation of it—a way of writing all too easily sanctioned by contemporary schools of verse. The better part of what is published as poetry now originates, not from the deep necessity that characterizes the work of a poet like Robinson Jeffers, but as a careerist venture, a professional marker, so to speak, and from which the author may proceed, if he or she is lucky, to a higher rung on the professional ladder. But that kind of success has little to do with the deep and lasting achievement in a genuine work of art.
 

19.  The stately measure of Jeffers’s lines is not merely a matter of verse technique, but of a passionate conviction that energizes the verse lines and forms them into a pattern that will seem, to the alert reader, inevitable. And this is opposed to the non-verse of much contemporary writing: no substance, no  conviction, just a form of self-amusement very much in tune with what has been called “the entertainment state.”

20.  And it is here that I would quote from the critical writing of Hayden Carruth, in speaking of an older discipline now mostly set aside:

You believe your writing can be a separate part of your life, but it can’t. A writer’s writing occurs in the midst of, and by means of, all the materials of life, not just a selected few. . . . And it isn’t a paradox that you can choose necessity, if you seek the right objectives; and it will be no less inexorable because you have chosen it. Once you are in it, your writing will be in it too. (Reluctantly, 38)

22.  In “Poets Without Prophecy,” an essay written in 1963 and published in The Nation, Carruth had this to say of a contemporary shift in writing from substance to technique:

[T]here distinctly was something grand and ennobling in the idea that a poet was to be known not by his art but by his vision . . . something essential. And we have lost it. . . . Once the poet was our spokesman . . . and if he did not speak for all of us . . . if his poems lacked the larger vision of humanity, we said he was deficient in one of the qualities that, virtually by definition, make a poet. (Working Papers, 54–55)

. . . came into the world at a time when the poet’s direct responsibility to mankind at large hadn’t quite been laughed out of existence. . . . [T]his erosion of the larger view has reached a point at which poetry has become almost totally apolitical. (Working Papers, 55–56)

25.  It is true that this voice to which I refer, confirmed here by Carruth, can be heard at times in the work of other poets of our early modern period, and Jeffers was by no means alone, as different in their verse as most of them were.  E E cummings, for example, did not hesitate to excoriate his contemporaries,  as in:

pity this busy monster manunkind
not. Progress is a comfortable disease,
your victim, life and death safely beyond,
plays with the littleness of his bigness . . .

These
are the desolate dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man . . .

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth . . .

29.  I think we can say that Jeffers is very much in that tradition, the only tradition that really matters: that of the poet and artist as speaker of the truth. The voice underlying the words has that necessary continuity I associate with a kind of mastery. In thinking of what we can call the permanent work of our time, Jeffers was, and is, of that company.

30.  I don’t mean to imply that a poet who falls outside this tradition is to be dismissed as of no consequence. There are many styles and modes, voices in poetry and song, that give pleasure and for one reason or another are deserving  of praise. My major concern here has been with that other, public voice.

31.  Edwin Muir concludes one of his lectures in his important book, The Estate of Poetry, with the following remarks:

Our world presents the imagination with certain questions not asked before, or not asked in the same way. Public indifference [to poetry] may be expected to continue, but perhaps the audience will increase when poetry loses what obscurity is left in it by attempting greater themes, for great themes have to be clearly stated. A great theme greatly treated might still put poetry back in its old place. (The Estate of Poetry, 93)

33.  I’m going to end by reading a poem written in the past year or so, and still unpublished. The sources of the poem are extensive, and I won’t attempt to list them here. I will acknowledge, however, that the first stanza owes something of its imagery to the New York writer and critic, Alfred Kazin, in his books written of his early years in Brooklyn and Manhattan: Starting Out in the Thirties, and A Walker in the City. A few images from his pages remained with me.

34.  I can’t claim that Jeffers had any direct influence on the poem. In its verse and tone of voice it is very different from his work. I believe, however, that something in the background of the poem, in its point of view, its reference to Roman history, may place it in that tradition.

35.  The American Dream

It would have to be something dark,
glazed as in a painting. A corridor
leading back to a forgotten neighborhood
where a ball is bounced from street
to street, and we hear from a far corner
the vendor’s cry in a city light.

It would have to be dusk, long after
sunlight has failed. A shrouded figure
at the prow of a ship, staring
and pointing—as if one might see
into that new land still unventured,
and beyond it, coal dust and gaslight,
vapors of an impenetrable distance.

Too many heroes, perhaps: a MacArthur
striding the Philippine shallows; a sports
celebrity smeared with a period color.
A voice in the air: a Roman orator
declaiming to an absentee Forum
the mood of their failing republic.

It would have to be night. No theater
lights, a dated performance shut down.
And in one’s fretful mind a ghost
in a rented cassock pacing the stage,
reciting to himself a history:

“Here were the elected Elders, chaired
and bewigged. And placed before them
the Charter: they read it aloud,
pass it with reverence from hand to hand.

“Back there in the curtained shadows
the people’s chorus waited, shifting
and uncertain; but sometimes among them
a gesture, a murmur of unrest.

“And somewhere here, mislaid, almost
forgotten, the meaning of our play
its theme and blunted purpose . . .”
                                                                      

---

Carruth, Hayden. Reluctantly: Fragments of an Autobiography. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 1998.

_____. Working Papers: Selected Essays and Reviews. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982.
Muir, Edwin. Essays on Literature and Society. 1949. Rev. ed. London: Hogarth, 1965.

_____. The Estate of Poetry. 1962. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf P, 1993.

_____. The Story and the Fable. 1940. Boston: Rowan Tree P, 1987.
 

Noted poet John Haines is the author of Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer:   Collected Poems (1993, expanded edition 1996), Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays (1996), Living Off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place (1981), and numerous collections of poetry. His essay “Thoughts on Robinson Jeffers” appeared in The Gettysburg Review 2.2 (Spring 1989). Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Mr. Haines lived in Alaska for nearly fifty years, and currently resides in Montana.

Added: March 13, 2001