Edited by Robert Brophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 1995, 248 pages.
Discussions among scholars of Robinson Jeffers often focus on the contradictions in the poet's life and work, ranging from the mundane (Jeffers decries the encroachment of civilization on nature but builds the first dwelling on Carmel Point), to the philosophical (he recognizes the role of violence as an agent of change in the flux he calls God but condemns human violence in the form of everyday cruelty or war), to the aesthetic (Jeffers notes that language cannot express the ineffable but continues to use language in an attempt to do so). The latest collection of essays on Jeffers gathered by Robert Brophy demonstrates that these and other contradictions are not dead ends or even obstacles for the poet: rather, his struggle not so much to resolve them as to experience and understand them is at the heart of his poetry. The contributions in this volume, all by eminent scholars of Jeffers, show that the poet approached these problems in many works and in many ways, revealing a rich multi-faceted texture in poems which may appear to the casual reader repetitious or foggy and justifying the word "dimensions" in the title Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet.
The collection begins with a stage-setting essay, "Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Carmel-Sur," by editor Brophy, who describes the poet's life and career with both precision and brevity. This essay is aimed at the reader who might be unaware of Jeffers's work or might need a review of that work before moving into the detailed analyses of specific works and issues ahead. Professor Brophy also provides at the end of the volume a review of Jeffers scholarship and a bibliography of works by Jeffers. Brophy also supplies several pages of photo illustrations, including a sample of Jeffers's handwriting.
The lead-off critical essay, "In the Poet's Lifetime" by Alex Vardamis, who has tracked the critical response to Jeffers for decades, provides a ground for the other essays in the book by reviewing the assessment of Jeffers made by his contemporaries, thereby suggesting starting points for recent critical works.
Robert Zaller, a historian as well as a Jeffers scholar, is uniquely qualified to analyze "Robinson Jeffers and the Uses of History." Zaller finds Jeffers's the-ory of history to be based on those of Lucretius, Vico, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Although Jeffers insists repeatedly in his works that he does not want to concern himself with the ephemeral, he does not insist on viewing people and events from an "eternal" perspective, either. Zaller demonstrates that Jeffers thought that all life and all history are in a constant state of change. That which exists over a long period or that which is constantly renewed, what Zaller calls "the perdurable," concerned Jeffers. One of Jeffers's paradoxes appears in the corollary idea that one of the functions of human consciousness is, in rare moments, to stand outside the flux as did Orestes at the end of "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" and bear witness to the truth of the perdurable. Thus human consciousness itself is perdurable, but that condition gives humanity no special privilege, as Jeffers notes in his many poems warning against saviorhood, several of which Zaller analyzes in the course of his study.
The next two essays attempt to connect Jeffers's work with artistic and criti-cal traditions with which he originally seemed out of step (see Vardamis). Terry Beers, in "Telling the Past and Living the Present: 'Thurso's Landing' and the Epic Tradition," points out that though the characters in "Thurso's Landing" at first appear to be in conflict with the authorial voice, a number of judgments and rhetorical tropes suggest that the characters reach conclusions similar to those of the authorial voice. Beers uses these previously unrecognized similari-ties to connect Jeffers not only to the epic tradition, with its hortatory concern for revealing the failures of tragic lives and also suggesting better ways to live, but also with Ezra Pound, a poet with whom Jeffers would seem to share little. Pound, like Jeffers, sought to recover for poetry the teaching and healing role which it has held in other times and societies. A revised version of this essay appears in Professor Beers's book, "... a thousand graceful subtleties": Rheto-ric in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (New York: Peter Lang, 1995).
Tim Hunt's "Jeffers's 'Roan Stallion' and the Narrative of Nature" (an expanded version of his introduction to the 1990 Yolla Bolly Press edition of that poem) connects Jeffers to the theories of the Modernists but also shows that his work carried Modernist thought a further step. For the Modernists, art was a way of escaping the confusion and turmoil of existence by rendering that process understandable. A well-made work of art stops the world for a time and gives us a place of refuge while we apprehend it. For Jeffers, such confusion and turmoil was not to be escaped or even understood (because "understanding" makes too large a claim for humanity's limited comprehension) but to be experienced and in brief moments, transcended, and his narrative poems were his attempts to do so, taking his reader with him on his own experiment in discovery. Hunt's essay shows us Jeffers dealing with the paradox of language's failure to present true knowledge, yet also acting as an agent in helping us to reach a knowledge greater than that conveyed by language alone. As Hunt puts it, "Nature's vision of itself ... is only partially and intermittently available to us as individuals.... Jeffers's sense of nature ... allows the action of knowing but does not allow translating knowing into something as final and fixed as knowledge; that would abstract knowing from being. Knowing can only emerge from ex-perience and is dialectically bound to it." "Roan Stallion," with its inarticulate and uncomprehending heroine, California, is an excellent example of Jeffers's use of the experience of the poem itself as a means of understanding.
David J. Rothman also reveals Jeffers's treatment of a paradox in his essay, "'Divinely Superfluous Beauty': Robinson Jeffers's Versecraft of the Sublime." Professor Rothman reviews previous studies of Jeffers's prosody and theories of verse to which Jeffers might be thought to have responded (such as those of Robert Bridges) and concludes that those features of Jeffers's verse which often have been condemned are instead the strength of his poetic framework. "Jeffers's versecraft ... grounds the evocation of everything that the poem is not, and cannot possibly represent: the immeasurable and sublime 'oblivion' in which even all of art and nature are just a minuscule flutter. The versification is not imitating its theme; it is at its source." This essay should be read in conjunction with Tim Hunt's, and editor Brophy has cannily placed them side by side in the collection.
One section of Dimensions of a Poet explores Jeffers's treatment of women not through an essay but a symposium. "Robinson Jeffers and the Female Archetype" is an edited version of a panel discussion held at the 1993 American Literature Association meeting and featuring moderator Robert Zaller, Mark Jarman, Mark Mitchell, Tim Hunt, and Jacqueline Vaught Brogan. Later Diane Wakoski and Betty Adcock added their written responses to the symposium. Much attention is focused on Clare Walker, the heroine of "The Loving Shepherdess" and one of Jeffers's least threatening characters, but one who none-theless arouses controversy. This section suffers from the fact that only one of the original panelists was a woman, resulting in the addition of written re-sponses by two other female critics who were not part of the original discussion and therefore lack the enlivening give and take of oral presentation. As is usual in panels of this type, there is as much concern with the role of women in society as there is judgment of Jeffers's narrative treatment and philosophical view of women.
Kirk Glaser explores another dimension of the poet's work in "Desire, Death, and Domesticity in Jeffers's Pastorals of Apocalypse." Beginning with an analysis of the short lyric "Fire on the Hills," with its description of natural forces which simultaneously destroy, cleanse, and renew, Glaser shows the same vision appearing and the same force operating in several other works, including "Post Mortem," "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," and "Bixby's Landing." He concludes by relating Jeffers's apocalyptic view to other poets whose work has come to prominence after Jeffers's death, such as Gary Snyder and Joy Harjo. Jeffers opened pathways for these writers by returning America's collective artistic consciousness to the subject of nature and our role in it. Professor Glaser reminds us of the importance of Jeffers's work to the ecological movement. Once again, the poet wrote of these issues before there was an organized effort to study and save the environment.
The collection ends with two essays investigating Jeffers's role as a religious figure, or more accurately, as a stimulator of thought on the subject of religion. Alan Soldofsky's "Nature and the Symbolic Order: The Dialogue Between Czeslaw Milosz and Robinson Jeffers" discusses how Jeffers's poetry influenced the work of the Polish Nobel laureate. Although Milosz's view of God is ultimately Christian and very different from the monistic Jeffers, the American poet's philosophy, particularly his view of nature, helped the European poet when he had become professor of Slavic Languages at the University of California at Berkeley. The inclusion of this essay reminds us of another dimension—Jeffers is not just an American, but a global poet whose vision transcends national boundaries.
The last essay is "All Flesh Is Grass," a chapter from William Everson's The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Everson argues that Jeffers is actually a mystic (the poet himself would undoubtedly dispute this conclusion) whose work is an attempt to force the reader to experience the numinous or, what Everson calls, borrowing a phrase from Rudolph Otto, the mysterium tremendum. Logic can only take us so far in understanding God, says Everson: "We do not experience the change in attitude from agnosticism to religious belief by virtue of rational reflection. Rather, we are brought to our knees by an experience of such profundity ... that we are unable any longer to sustain detachment." Jeffers's work is both an investigation of this condition and an attempt to replicate it. Jeffers scholars may find it anticlimactic to end the volume with this selection, which has been available for nearly decade, but the collection would be incomplete without the voice of Jeffers's most fervent admirer. This essay also shows the foundation on which several of the other contributions rest.
Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet is certainly thorough and thought-provoking. It belongs in the library of every serious student of Jeffers. Professor Brophy and the other scholars who appear in this volume not only show us that Jeffers indeed had many dimensions, but they remind us that the questions which concern us about his work and the world in which we live are dealt with by the poet on whole other levels, "deep in the granite." Once more, he is there before all of us.

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