ROBINSON JEFFERS: POET FOR THE NEW CENTURY
Robert Brophy
Poets enrich our world; without them we would suffer spiritual
malnutrition. Some are celebrators of communal life--the Whitmans and
Sandburgs who see the beauty of those who people the land, the vitality
of the great cities, the diversity and immense promise of the
melting-pot population; looking away from evil, they prefer to warm to
the good, trumpeting what should be, what can be, what is some ways is.
Other poets, less sanguine, more cautious, respond to a more tragic
quality in their times. They sense decline, failure of the dream,
corruption and perversity at society's core, perhaps even the essential
narcissism of the race's self-preoccupation. Robinson Jeffers speaks to
us from this latter group. Indeed he is first and foremost a celebrator,
but not of mankind. He has "fallen in love outward," swept away by the
beauty of the universe, which he sees as divine. This is one side of his
poetics, a psalmist for his pantheistic god; the other side is critic of
this time, a relentless voice, pronouncing doom to mankind's egocentric
hopes, a prophet like Isaiah, demanding holiness and wholeness and
renunciation of false gods.
John Robinson Jeffers was born near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January
10, 1887, of the talented, youthful Annie Robinson Tuttle and the
fiftyish Presbyterian preacher-theologian, William Hamilton Jeffers. His
temperament seems to have been molded in his early Years by two
factors--his father's heavy-handed discipline and intermittent schooling
in Europe. He later recalled: "When I was nine years, old my father
began to slap Latin into me, literally with his hands; and when I was
eleven he put me in a boarding school in Switzerland--a new one every
year for four years--Vevey, Lausanne, Geneva, Zurich." The discipline
and the suppression of normal boyhood social life produced, whatever the
other predispositions, a personality which did not take easily to
companionship, that sought the solitude and contemplation characteristic
of his mature life.
Yet there was to be a time for some social flowering. Occidental
College, which he attended from 1903 to 1905, afforded him, for the
first time, steady companionship. He became a frequent contributor to
the school literary magazine and finally became its editor. He showed
himself an indefatigable hiker, a font of erudition, poetic quotations,
and linguistic expertise. Significantly his hiking made him a not
infrequent visitor at the nearby Mt. Wilson Observatory, where Edwin
Hubble was later to gain fame for discovering galaxies and establishing
their flight from each other into ever-extended space.
After graduation at age eighteen, June 1905, in a class of eleven,
Jeffers enrolled as a literature student at the University of Southern
California where he met his future wife, Una Call Kuster. Seven years of
furtive meetings (for she was married) and painful separations finally
brought them together in marriage in the August of 1913. Meanwhile
during this postgraduate time he had quit the literary program to pursue
almost three years at the USC medical school, then a semester in
literature at the University of Zurich, and, finally, more course work,
this time in forestry, and the University of Washington.
His educational hegira seems truly eclectic and random, yet eventually
it all comes together, as though carefully formulated. His European
sojourns and immersion in language and literature enabled him to leap
geographic barriers and move back and forth through centuries of
culture. Latin, Greek, French, and German gave him a precise knowledge
of words. His father's religious influence and the Calvinist catechism,
assiduously absorbed, instilled an intense religious questioning, a
sense of original sin, harsh self-mastery, and an expectation of God.
The Bible gave him a rich fund of poetic of language, archetypal story,
allusion and symbol. Science instilled a clinical imagination, an
astronomic view of the world and time, a sense of apocalyptic violence
imminent in all things, a recognition of correspondences, atom and
electron, solar system and galaxy. Medicine impressed him with a
romance-deflating outlook on human aspirations, a clinical assessment of
glands and nerve fibrils. It also put him in touch with pain, death, and
the corruption of the flesh. Classical literature opened to him the
world of Greek theater, myth patterns, and ritual drama. Old English
literature along with biblical verse yielded to him an alternative to
the metered verse of his time. Philosophy introduced Heraclitus and
Lucretius, with their sense of the primal ebb and flow of being;
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer taught transvaluation of values and grim
realism about the world. And the study of forestry made him privy to an
intimate knowledge of flowers and trees which fill his poetry. This not
to say that all or most of the above was encompassed in his formal
education; he never ceased to enrich his mind and broaden his interests;
academic preparation only set the directions.
All this time the young Jeffers was writing poetry--second-rate poetry,
full of romantic pangs and Byronian stances which found their way into
print in the USC University Courier and then into a slim volume, Flagons and Apples
(1912). Indeed Jeffers was self-assured enough in his talent that he was
planning to take his wife to Lyme Regis on the southern coast of
England, there to pursue a writing vocation, when the imminent cataclysm
of World War I overruled him, and he turned, almost by chance, to
Carmel, California. There he sensed immediately that he had come into
his own.
Jeffers freely identified the two greatest influences on his life and
poetry as the Carmel landscape and his wife, Una. Una was truly a matrix
of both his imaginative and personal life. She was part of him. Without
her, his literary career, to say nothing of his social survival, is
inconceivable. Una was the liberated woman of her day. She broke with
its tight conventions to evoke divorce from her successful but
neglectful husband. Having completed a masters degree in philosophy at
USC, she had started further graduate work at UC Berkeley at the time of
her marriage to Jeffers. During her life she kept her own distinct
intellectual enthusiasms, became an expert lecturer on Irish music,
architecture, and art, and was an avid reader and a book reviewer for a
small California magazine. She was socially adroit and discriminating, a
peer to literary and artistic greats who came to her home, ostensibly to
meet her husband, only to be charmed , challenged, and cultivated by her
lively mind and thorough acquaintance with the world of culture. She was
beautiful, vocal, at times imperial; she solidified family friendship
and kept a network of contacts through letter-writing. She ran a tight
household on a small budget--twin sons to be clothed, fed, tutored, and
cherished, an abstracted artist-husband to be nurtured , protected,
scheduled, and loved. She was exuberant in her joy of life and in her
fits of anger. She mediated and modulated life for the poet.
The Carmel Big Sur landscape was both Jeffers's medium and his message.
All of his poetry from 1914 quarried its seascape and crenelated
canyons, isolated beaches, and foreboding headlands for symbol, theme,
and story. The landscape taught Jeffers--the violent nature of beauty
and the importunate epiphanies of God, the cycle of storm and serenity,
solstice and equinox, erosion and burgeoning life. In a late poem he
asserts: "My love, my loved subject: mountain and ocean, rock, water and
beasts and trees / Are the protagonists; the human people are only
symbolic interpreters." The landscape then is the message itself; he
peoples his narrative because mankind is mostly deaf and blind to the
non-human and needs his intervention.
The landscape also provided another, more solid element for this
quarryman--granite stones two-hundred weight from the shore beneath his
knoll to create Tor House and Hawk Tower from 1919 onward-- the native
earth-element domesticated to his use with careful ritual and ecological
concern. Mornings he hammered out lines for his poems; afternoons he
hauled, shunted, sided, and lifted, one by one, without companion or
helper, year after year. The buildings were poems like his others,
inhuman yet accommodated to human use.
One piece in the mystery of his poetic consciousness is missing and its
particulars probably will never be documented. Sometime close to his
thirtieth year, Jeffers underwent an extraordinary deepening and
self-integration, often described in terms of a religious conversion.
Sometime during college or shortly thereafter, it is certain that the
orthodox religious world of his father fell away. The transitional
period, hedonistic, experimental, at times drunken, was freeing if
painful. However, on his settling down with his wife in the primitive,
soul-scouring landscape of Carmel came a peace and integration, which
gave his poetry unusual strength and authenticity. He found himself
possessed of a philosophy which he was later to label "Inhumanism," a
consistent, thorough-going world-view based on his scientific insights,
paced by astronomic perspectives, and inspirited by a mystic sense of
immanent divinity. For him, the world became the ongoing self-discovery
by God, who unfolds in the secrets of atoms and galaxies all the
possibilities of being.
Life in this primitive, divinity-charged world is change; spring to
fall, summer to winter, these and all things else recapitulate the
cycle. Death is inevitable and final; immortality is delusion. Pain is
endemic and to be reconciled; pleasure and pursuit of security are
deadening escapism. Mankind is a temporary phenomenon, a fragile, errant
experiment of God, on a tiny dust-speck planet in the swirling sandstorm
of a cosmos, which evolves and collapses in eighty-two billion year
oscillations. Consciousness is a universal quality, but the human mind
focuses it uniquely--either to praise God or grossly to distort the
world in puerile self-aggrandizement. The cosmos is predetermined by all
its vectors. Civilization and races rise and fall, emerge and disappear.
Mankind's actions are fated but the individual can step out and
contemplate the process. God is nothing like humans, is savage,
indifferent, encompassing good and evil. He needs no help, brooks no
interference. Saviorism is the bane of the best-intentioned; ultimately
arrogant, it is doomed to frustration. Hold your hand up to the waves of
the seashore; see how many of them you stop of an afternoon, Jeffers
would seem to say.
Virtue lies in detachment, indifference, stoicism--in turning outward
and worshipping God. Wisdom lies in un-centering from mankind, seeing
from this God's perspective. Peace is stoic balance compensating for
innate biases toward immortality, invulnerability, stability, immunity
from pain and sickness. Piety lies in reverence for the surrounding
beauty, which is God's signature and presence.
For thirty years Jeffers wrote poetry, almost a volume a year, Tamar to
Hungerfield. In limelight or in shadow, he was content to "chronicle the
human landscape of the Western Shore," as his friend James Rorty put it
after a visit in 1924. His short lyrics are mini-sermons to a race out
of "sync" with its world. They define beauty, mediate death, exalt
natural phenomena, reconcile wars, focus human misery, champion simple
life, glorify wilderness, scour the landscape of humans, harmonize
beauty, pain, violence, and change. His longer poems, thirty or more,
present parables for understanding the world and mankind's place in it.
They confront natural depravity ("Tamar"), mystic vision ("Roan
Stallion"), disengagement from lust and power ("The Tower Beyond
Tragedy"), renunciation of security ("Cawdor"), warnings against
megalomania ("The Women at Point Sur"), the trap of saviorism ("The
Loving Shepherdess"), and many more themes. One his eight plays,
"Medea," made a spectacular Broadway run in the 1940s with Dame Judith
Anderson in the title role. One of a piece with his other poetic works,
it probes the repercussions of human arrogance in a world in which
nature retaliates.
Jeffers's literary reputation skyrocketed in the 1920s, crested in the
30s, and plummeted in the 40s, especially with his polemical Double Axe
volume (1948). After decades of neglect during which he appeared only
sporadically in anthologies, his poetry is once again being appreciated
by critic and reading public alike. There are those in the literary
intelligentsia who think he will be one of the few great American poets
of our century.
Much of what he is being valued for now is what in his lifetime caused
neglect and dismissal. As the century turns, he offers his cosmic vision
to a world that, aided by NASA space probes and the Hubble and Keck
telescopes, is finally awakening to the universe and has begun, in his
phrase, to "turn outward." His "inhumanism" is no longer a synonym for
misanthropy but a newfound and wonderfully apt word. Through it the
ecologist goes beyond a progressive but still selfish sense of mere
stewardship toward an awed realization that mankind is only one species
among myriad others which have purposes of their own, not human-related,
and are part, as Jeffers would say, "one organism." To a world where
wilderness is fast being clear-cut, invaded by off-the-road vehicles,
and is more stringently asphalt-ringed, his awe for total Otherness, as
in his lyric"The Place for No Story," finds healing resonance. His
incessant warnings of a population overwhelming the biosphere is no
longer rantings. And his verse, stark, uncompromising, terse, incisive
is eminently accessible and memorable. Jeffers seems, as it were, born
out of his time. He may prove to be the prophet/seer/pathfinder for
the twenty-first Century.
© 2005 Jeffers Studies
Contact: Jeffers Studies