Edited by William Thesing. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995, 418 pages. Contents: William Thesing: "Foreword"; Tim Hunt: "Introduction"; Neal Bowers: "Jeffers and Merwin: The World beyond Words"; Terence Diggory: "The Momentum of Syntax in the Poems of Robinson Jeffers"; David Copland Morris: "Critical Orthodoxy and Inhumanist Poetics: The Question of Technique in Jeffers, Dickey, Mallarmé, and Stevens"; Gilbert Allen: "Passionate Detachment in the Lyrics of Jeffers and Yeats"; Kyle Norwood: "'Enter and Possess': Jeffers, Frost, and the Borders of the Self"; Colin Falck: "Robinson Jeffers: American Romantic?"; Patrick D. Murphy: "Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and the Problem of Civilization"; Gordon Van Ness: "'The Lonely Self-Watchful Passion': Narrative and the Poetic Role of Robinson Jeffers and James Dickey"; Wayne Cox: "Robinson Jeffers and the Conflict of Christianity"; Mary McCormack: "The Women of Robinson Jeffers and T. S. Eliot: Mythical Parallels in 'Give Your Heart to the Hawks' and The Family Reunion"; Alan Brasher: "'Their Beauty Has More Meaning': Transcendental Echoes in Jeffers's Inhumanist Philosophy of Nature"; Calvin Bedient: "Robinson Jeffers, D. H. Lawrence, and the Erotic Sublime"; Tim Hunt, editor: "Jeffers and the Modern(ist) Terrain: Competing and/or Complementary Poetics? A Panel Discussion with Charles Altieri, Terence Diggory, Albert Gelpi, and James E. Miller, Jr."
Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers presents essays by contemporary scholars which help to confirm the stylistic and thematic centrality of Jeffers's poetry in his era as well as to trace out his often overlooked influence on poets writing today. Editor William Thesing published the collection in honor of William H. Nolte, whose Rock and Hawk (1978) remains a seminal volume in Jeffers studies. Thesing, a student of Nolte's in the 1960s, contributes a foreword on Nolte's career and a bibliographical appendix of Nolte's books, articles, and reviews. Thesing reminds us that Nolte's Rock and Hawk clarified central themes in Jeffers's poetry and helped to change critical and public perceptions of the poet and his work, stating that it "did much to help end a critical astigmatism that had previously raised objection to Jeffers's poetry on politi-cal grounds." Further, Thesing writes, Nolte argued in Rock and Hawk "that Jeffers was not to be assigned to a philosophical category or to any literary movement such as romanticism or modernism" (xiii). Jeffers's work, according to Nolte, must be seen as an affirmation of the world through catharsis (as Aristotle wrote of the Greek tragedies), not as a nihilist's prophetic stance.
While this catharsis makes sense for Jeffers, trained in and influenced by Greek and Roman classics, Nolte's claim that Jeffers should not be assigned to a philosophical or literary movement seems to rub against the grain of many essays in this collection, including Tim Hunt's excellent introduction that places Jeffers in active engagement with the modernists. Many essays look at Jeffers in relation to romantic and modernist writers in ways that reveal his conflicts and convergences with them. Others examine Jeffers's influence on contemporary writers such as Merwin, Dickey, and Snyder. At times Jeffers serves as a background figure against which another poet's work may be explored. This in itself seems a fortuitous turn for Jeffers criticism, since it places Jeffers in larger dialogues about nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.
Tim Hunt's introduction traces out Jeffers's critical reception from the 1920s through the 1950s and identifies the shift in Jeffers criticism occurring now, represented by this collection of essays: "This Jeffers is still concerned with ideas and still advances claims about the proper place of humankind in nature and about nature's redemptive capacity, but he is not the larger-than-life prophetic presence an earlier generation of readers felt the need to affirm or deny" (2). Hunt and many of the writers in Galaxy examine Jeffers through a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives. Further, Hunt points out how the increased knowledge of, and distance from, the poet's life which current scholars possess allow us to perceive Jeffers as he was politically situated, shaped by the projects of earlier poets, working out in unique and conflicting ways the issues and problems faced by his contemporaries. All of this confirms that Jeffers was neither isolated nor peripheral. Hunt proves his point by comparing recently uncovered early drafts of "Sign-Post" to the printed version and examining the two-stage genesis of "Hurt Hawks." He uses this "copy-text" analysis as a basis to compare Jeffers's aesthetic with Eliot's. As Hunt quotes Eliot from "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the artist's "progress [was] a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" (3). Jeffers would agree, states Hunt, though he would locate this "process of depersonalization" in nature rather than in Eliot's poetic tradition which redeemed and erased the poet. Jeffers the poet, then, "becomes a figure who asks ultimate questions and wants to propose ultimate answers but who mostly recognizes the contingency of his own human understanding and will ... and the limits of language" (2).
Alan Brasher looks back to the nineteenth century to analyze Jeffers's thematic relations to Emerson and Thoreau. He aptly traces out how Jeffers diverges from Emerson's view of human relations to nature, as in his reading of Jeffers's "Vulture": "Emerson would rise above nature, while Jeffers wishes to be digested by it" (153). In other words, Brasher explains a bit earlier in his essay, Emerson sees human consciousness as a means to rule nature, while "Jeffers sees man's [sic] unique mind as a physical occurrence that, though providing him with an unrivaled awareness of the natural world, does not finally elevate him above it" (151). This reading enables us to reconsider Cartesian dualities through Jeffers, since the mind for Jeffers is "part and parcel" of the world (as Emerson or Thoreau might put it). Brasher unfortunately spends less time developing his argument that Jeffers's inhumanism more closely parallels the vision of Thoreau. Partly this is a problem of comparing dissimilar genres and a lack of direct influence (Jeffers claiming not to have read Thoreau), but Brasher opens useful doors for further study of these two nature iconoclasts.
Neal Bowers, in his comparison of Jeffers and Merwin, looks closely at how the two, though "stylistically very different," share much common ground in their "visionary ecology" (12). Both poets work in reaction to modernist and post-modernist cultures that give primacy to language (and human imagination for the modernists) over the reality of the physical world. Bowers explores the differing poetic tropes each poet employs to reach similar ends. He sums up near the end of his essay (22):
The removal of humanity from the scene, whether accomplished by voluble edict [Jeffers] or quiet verbal erasure [Merwin], leads inevitably to the consideration of a reality beyond human cognition. By positing a world that operates outside our lives and doesn't need us, Jeffers and Merwin establish a condition of otherness. Jeffers says nature is utterly beyond us, though we may sense its awesome beauty; Merwin shows it is tantalizing close, veiled in language.
For both poets, working in a mystical tradition, the language of poetry becomes redemptive, a means to approach (if not attain) the mystical and natural other. Bowers contrasts this view of language with the modern/post-modern vision of language as the central reality of existence—a vision which leads to a subjectivity that negates external reality and leads, Bowers argues, to cultural as well as individual solipsism.
David Morris presents in greater detail than Bowers a discussion of Jeffers's aesthetic rejection of modernism (especially of Mallarmé and the symbolist enterprise). Drawing on the theory of Wylie Sypher, Morris argues that the focus on language in symbolism and modernism "can be seen as having disturbing affinities with the fetish of technique in the economic sphere that contributes to environmental degradation" (45). He presents Jeffers's well-known statements about his poetic turning point when he rejected the narrow confines (as Jeffers saw them) of the modernists' language experiments for a poetry whose rhythms and content serve as a mimesis for the natural world. For Jeffers, states Morris, "the mind and poetry both are kinds of epiphenomena of the energy of the world" (49), and Charles Olson provides Morris with the aesthetic theory to support Jeffers's vision: "... art is the only twin life has—its only valid metaphysic" (50). All this leads to an interesting comparison of Stevens and Jeffers. Morris explores poems by Stevens where a Jeffersian inhumanism and Stevens's famous humanism conflict and seem to merge, where "Imagination and mere being seem mysteriously to share the same essence" (56). Both poets, Morris suggests, dip into each other's realm, and he thereby points the way to further important studies of these two poets—an exciting prospect both for "centralizing" Jeffers and for opening up new views on Stevens's poetics.
Gilbert Allen and Kyle Norwood also compare Jeffers to two of his approximate contemporaries—Yeats and Frost respectively. Allen shows how Yeats and Jeffers share a similar disillusionment with "the forces of rationalism and commerce [that] have corrupted the modern world" (61). Both advocate forms of detachment, though Yeats turns to a "cultural past" to reaffirm the best of what has been lost while Jeffers turns to a geological past as he searches for "a culture worthy of nature" (66). Norwood similarly sees different poetic solutions to similar problems when comparing Jeffers and Frost. Employing Kristeva's theory of the abject and its relation to the sublime, Norwood argues that "Frost sides with pragmatic humanity against human abjection and unsignifiable, chaotic nature; Jeffers sides with beautiful inhuman nature against abject 'incestuous' humanity" (70).
Two writers, Calvin Bedient and Colin Falck, compare Jeffers to D. H. Law-rence and reveal the potential for a field of future study. Like Norwood, Bedient employs Kristeva's notion of the abject but more fully develops ideas of the sublime as they relate to Jeffers's narrative poetry. He then uses his comparison to place Jeffers within the dynamic of modernism. As Bedient states in his introduction (160):
Robinson Jeffers and D. H. Lawrence came spinning out of the same cul-tural waterspout. For both, physics and theories of evolution on the one hand, and disgust with historical humanity on the other—in particular, with Christian, self-important, warring humanity—led to a religion of the inhuman universe. Look without, look within, and you find the one thing needful—an extra-human greatness of reality.
Jeffers and Lawrence went "beyond their fellow modernists," Bedient argues, to transform "the beautiful into something inhumanly sublime" (160). While differences between the two loom large (Lawrence turning "inward" to the psyche and human relationships much more than Jeffers), Bedient uses Kristeva, Kant, and Bataille to trace the two writers' shared psychology of the muse and the feminine in relation to the erotic and sublime. While the "erotic sublime" seems an inevitable phrase to employ with Lawrence, it emerges in the poetry of Jeffers, states Bedient, by how he writes the world into images: "Jeffers's images essentialize.... With him, beauty is almost always straitened by violence and vastness. His descriptions make love to what would shake off flesh with a shudder" (164).
Lawrence is less central to Colin Falck's essay, which presents a fairly stand-ard reading of Jeffers's romanticism and a familiar critique of faults in Jeffers's work, calling it at times bombastic, preachy, didactic, and rambling. Still, Falck finds Jeffers a superior "technician" to Lawrence as poet and sees Jeffers's best work to consist of a unique and strong free verse. Most interestingly, he focuses on the play of speech, rhythm, and rhetoric in Jeffers's and Lawrence's poetry to explore how each poet develops a prosody deriving from the necessity of his vision: "what they needed was a verse technique which would allow them to express a highly assertive philosophical stance which they had already won through to quite independently of their poetic writings" (88). A compelling issue Falck raises is how Jeffers, though possessing "a certain 'terrorist' qual-ity" in his romantic despair and idealistic scorn (84), is "more like an eight-eenth-century proselytizer in his insistence on the importance of 'reason' in human life" (90). While Falck indicts Jeffers even as he points to the successes of Jeffers's prosodic experiments, Diggory (as does Morris) analyzes Jeffers's style and language to confront the standard indictment leveled at Jeffers that his work lacks the precision and compression of modernist poetry. Through provocative readings of Jeffers's prosody in various poems, Diggory traces out the complex syntax, rooted in the classics, of Jeffers's verse. He explores, primarily through readings of Tamar, how the momentum, active verbal force, and intricate syntax of Jeffers's poetry often become a "mimesis of action" in the poems. Most essentially, he presents a compelling argument for the "counter-narrative" that Jeffers often thus creates through the momentum of his line. This counter- narrative "is a force pulling against the story of the characters" which there- by creates multiple, complex meanings traditionally overlooked in Jeffers's poetry (35).
Patrick Murphy and Gordon Van Ness turn to several contemporary poets to assess Jeffers's work and continuing influence. Murphy examines the role of Jeffers in Gary Snyder's work and life. He seems to sum up his own argument when he quotes Snyder (94):
Jeffers's views, Snyder contends, "are those of an 'arhat,' one who seeks and wins enlightenment for himself alone, but sees no way to carry on the benefit for the rest of sentient beings, especially human beings.... I would contrast this with the other Buddhist view, the ideal of the bhodhisattva—one who accepts and lives in the tangles and troubles of the human world as long as necessary."
Murphy uses this paradigm to show how Snyder recasts Jeffers's detachment through his enterprise of synthesizing values from various cultures to build community. The essay seems to slide into hagiography of Snyder at times, and Jeffers is oddly judged as a poet from within the context of Snyder's philosophy. For Snyder, art must engage itself with community reformation, and Snyder is to be valued for his efforts in this. But as other writers in the volume point out (and as Snyder realized), Jeffers famously wrote in "Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years" that "Poetry ... is not necessarily a moralizer." Murphy claims that "Snyder has been able to see and understand more than Jeffers because, being both Zen and post-modern in consciousness, Snyder remains skeptical of the accuracy of his totalizing assertions ..." (104). While this is in some ways true, this hardly determines Snyder's poetry as superior to that of Jeffers. Many would judge the power of language and verse to place Jeffers in a higher seat, and Jeffers, too, often critiques his own vision. In "Apology for Bad Dreams," for example, Jeffers examines his own poetic creations as "horrible" and deformed inventions he creates to attempt to comprehend the inscrutable. He sees the limits of language and his own "totalizing assertions" to capture creation. Certainly Snyder knows much more about Buddhism, indigenous cultures, and ecology than Jeffers did, but the idea of "knowing more" in these terms as a means to determine superior poetics seems progressivist and therefore suspect by the very post-modernist terms which Murphy assembles for Snyder.
Gordon Van Ness considers how Jeffers's "approach to nature ... anticipates [James] Dickey's desire to enter into and identify with the physical world in a redemptive communion. Most importantly, however, Jeffers and Dickey share a common interest in mythology ..." (109). While Van Ness traces out overlapping techniques and themes between the poets, the study seems more one of contrasts, and the mythologies—Jeffers's mythologizing of permanent things and Dickey's mythologizing of self, as Van Ness aptly distinguishes the two—seem to have little to do with one another. While Dickey's poetry is explored fruitfully, one is left wondering just how Jeffers's nature mythos versus those of other poets, such as Frost or Williams for instance, influenced Dickey. As with several essays in the volume, Jeffers's work and themes are presented in general terms that seem to keep him cast in the role of nature prophet, whose word we are to take at face value—a role which other writers in the volume attempt to complicate. For instance, one wonders what Diggory or Bowers would say about a comment, referring to "A Place for No Story," such as "No linguistic effort accompanies the dramatic description to compel an imaginative entrance into 'the lonely self-watchful passion' whose presence here almost tangibly repeats itself" (112). They would likely find a complex linguistic effort being made in this poem about a man imposing a lyric, and consequently a set of cultural values, on a particular place, even as the poem claims to be presenting the place free of any human story.
Wayne Cox and Mary McCormack avoid problems of generalizing through detailed readings of several Jeffers poems. Cox traces out Jeffers's three-fold critique of Christianity and concludes that Jeffers is a deeply religious poet who, although he rejects Christianity, "show[s] respect for it by using and exploring its mythological framework" (124). The history and anthropocentrism of Christianity provide Jeffers with a means to explore central cultural and individual conflicts. Cox examines Dear Judas and "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" to show how Jeffers rewrites Christian myth to develop his unique pantheism. McCormack, in a rich essay, also looks at "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" and Jeffers's use of myth. However, she makes a detailed comparison of this poem with Eliot's Family Reunion (both using Aeschylus's Oresteia) which yields insights into how each poet employs myth and narrative in po- etry to explore contemporary ethical issues. McCormack cites Irigaray to assert the centrality of the Oresteian matricide over that of the Oedipal patricide in the Western psyche. She makes a strong argument for Jeffers as a kind of proto-feminist (at least in this poem). McCormack argues that through the character of Fayne, representative of the poet's voice, Jeffers conflates "wisdom and fertility, ... an earth mother and a reasoning goddess.... In Fayne, Jeffers connects instinctive knowledge with wisdom; he joins physicality with spirituality, a union Eliot does not recognize" (138). McCormack also makes intriguing in-sights into Jeffers's use of time and images of night, and she sums up the too common "problem" of reading Jeffers for many when she writes, "The modern reader is accustomed to searching a character's mind or actions for variations on ancient themes, but unused to standing outside characters, outside man-made answers, in order to understand human actions within the movement of time" (140). This relation of the modern reader to Jeffers figures strongly in the final chapter of Galaxy, a lively panel discussion featuring Charles Altieri, Terence Diggory, Albert Gelpi, and James E. Miller, Jr. These critics discuss how to see Jeffers as modern, if not a modernist, and suggest critical avenues to explore for insights into both his poetry and the work of modernists. As Gelpi points out (191), the mutual standoff between Jeffers and the modernists has not only been disastrous for Jeffers's reputation but has also been unfortunate for an understanding of modernism and the modernists because neither their position nor the modernist movement itself has been tested, challenged, refined, and clarified by the kind of critique which a serious consideration of Jeffers's position would require. (191)
Altieri later adds to this idea, stating that we need to consider "the intensity with which [Jeffers] takes on what are ... features of modernist ideology but which may require even more radical statement than the modernists themselves were willing to engage" (194). Altieri suggests "that the interesting possibility in reading Jeffers would be never to take him into the modernist canon but to keep seeing him as a kind of limit condition of the possibility of something else, that haunts modernism—which would make him very happy, actually" (202).
True enough—Jeffers would likely be happy to see his voice serving as a foil, or gadfly, to modernist writers. What this "something else" is remains the work of those who see the power in Jeffers's poetry. However, if one considers how the essays in this volume already link Jeffers's poetics and visions to the central concerns of writers of his era and ours (and if one considers how Jeffers out-Pounded Pound in his less pretentious use of classical sources to make poetry new), we are already well on our way to placing Jeffers firmly within (if located on a rocky outpost of) the essential poetry of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, many critics still seem to feel they must defend Jeffers and cover the familiar ground of explaining what he "really" meant by inhumanism. This "apologia" should pass away as volumes such as Galaxy establish Jeffers's centrality as a powerful craftsman and poetic thinker grappling with the central issues of his age.