A Study of Robinson Jeffers

"Of all the poets of his generation,

Robinson Jeffers made our relation to this earth and sea and sky and wheeling

seasons and the evolutionary processes that made trees and salmon runs and hunting hawks, his subject. As that relation grows more troubled, his words

become more necessary." -Robert Hass

Reconciliation of

Divinity & Inhumanism

"Shine, Perishing Republic"

be in nothing so moderate as

in love of man, a clever servant,/

insufferable master. / There is

the trap that catches noblest spirits,

that caught - they say - God when

he walked on earth. (1925)

I first encountered Jeffers in our assigned reading in the Norton Anthology. In its author note, Jeffers is described as an isolated, almost obscure, inhumanist. Thus, my initial impression of his poetry is predisposed to his philosophy. And this poem, the first poem I read by Jeffers, follows through with this sentiment - as America is described to be a country decaying into the elements, all of its constructions breaking down...

Here, Jeffers doesn't deny the existence of

[a] God, but his caution to the reader - against

"love of man" is striking as it challenges the

greatest Commandments as outlined in the

famous gospel passage to love God and, as

follows, to love others. Jeffers challenges this

in a bold,direct way.

So where does

this "inhumanism"

come from?

From "The Double Axe" (1948)

Jeffers defines inhumanism as "a

shifting of emphasis and significance

from man to not-man."

And thus the seeds are

sown for Jeffers' alienation

and obscurity...

Coupled with his physical

isolation from the world of

poetry and his unpopular

political beliefs, his

self-described "inhumanism"

rendered him inaccessible to

most and ammoral to many...

But perhaps a misunderstanding or

exaggeration emerges when Jeffers'

inhumanism is seen in the context

of his larger pantheism...

In a letter to his Sister Mary James Power (1934):

"As to my religious attitudes.... I believe that the universe is one

being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy,

and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole... The parts change and pass, or die, peoples and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all

its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affection outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imagination and abstractions - the world of spirits.

Thus enters what

Albert Gelpi calls the

"ongoing drama"...

Gelpi elaborates:

"Jeffers materialist sense of evolution posited

only the chance mutations of biological adaption and

saw the development of the human species as an

evolutionary mischance in which ego consciousness,

its distinctive trait, pits human-beings against the

harmonious integrity of natural processes."

"The Excesses of God"

Is it not by his high superflousness we know

Our God? For to equal a need

Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling

Rainbows over the rain

And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows

On the domes of the deep sea-shells,

And make the necessary embrace of breeding

Beautiful also as fire,

Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom

Nor the birds without music:

There is great humaneness at the heart of things,

The extravagant kindness, the fountain

Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise

If power and desire were perch-mates.

He's undeniably pantheistic...

and with his inhumanism woven

throughout his poems of violence

and raw sexuality, it seems as though

he seeks to challenge traditional religion...

And yet...

Religious rhetoric is

pervasive throughout

Jeffers' writing...

Personal Life

Jeffers, known to those close to him

as 'Robin,' was intensely close to his

family...

Born to Calvinist parents, Robin broke

away from his parents' religion but never

left behind the attitudes engrained into him

as a young student and scholar..

In the words of Albert Gelpi,

"The tragic sense and prophetic intent of Jeffers'

poetry are fired by a fierce Protestant piety and an

imagination unerringly Calvinist in its sense of the

Godhead as deus absconditus, sublimely above and

beyond unredeemably self-willed, ego-driven humans.

from "Carmel Point"

It knows that people are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. -As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

In studying Jeffers' poetry,

a visible dualism emerges.

As Gelpi points out, Jeffers abandons the

redemption of Calvinism but maintains its

bleak worldview - often rendering his writing 'pessimistic.'

Inhumanism

Absolute Divinity

Extinction of Humanity

Visible Pantheism

Total depravity

Unconditional election

Limited Atonement

Irresistable Grace

Perseverance of the Saints

Preservation of Form

"To His Father"

Christ was your lord and captain all your life,

He fails the world but you he did not fail,

He led you through all forms of grief and strife

Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail

Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake

That coils in one's own brain against your calm,

That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake

With coronal age and death like quieting balm.

I Father having followed other guides

And oftener to my hurt no leader at all,

Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides

For trophies on a savage temple wall

Hardly anticipate that reverend stage

Of life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age.

Jeffers was deeply influenced by his father - a Calvinist reverend

and theologian. Following the death of his father and his first child,

Jeffers drew intensely close to his wife, Una.

After Una's death, Jeffers reflects upon his grief in

"The Deer Lay Down Their Bones" -

Mine's empty since my love died - Empty? The

flame-haired grandchild with great blue eyes

That look like hers?- What can I do for the child? I gaze at her and wonder

what sort of man

In the fall of the world... I am growing old, that is the trouble. My

children and little grandchildren

Will find their way, and why should I wait ten years yet, having lived

sixty-seven, ten years more or less,

Before I crawl out on a ledge of rock and die snapping, like a wolf

Who has lost his mate? - I am bound by my own thirty-year-old decision:

who drinks the wine

Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment

New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down their

bones: I must wear mine.

Jeffers extends his wonderment toward his

grandchild...

From "Granddaughter"

Now she is five years old

And found herself; she does not ask any more but commands,

Sweet and fierce tempered; that light red hair of hers

Is the fuse for explosions. When she is eighteen

I'll not be here. I hope she will find her natural elements,

Laughter and violence; and in her quiet times

The beauty of things - the beauty of transhuman things,

Without which we are all lost. I hope she will find

Powerful protection and a man like a hawk to cover her.

So, Jeffers preserves a Calvinist approach while

denying the redemption typically symbolized through

Christ. His Calvinist approach, coupled with his

inhumanism, often results in an almost cold attitude. But, as can be seen in his life and poetry, Jeffers cultivated intensely intimate relationships with those close to him; as follows, the death of his loved ones forced him to grapple with his own mortality...

Dark Green Ecology

Decades after his death, Robin

Jeffers is rising to prominence as

a poetic voice in the modern

ecological crisis...

In "Dark Green Religion," Bron Taylor

identifies "The Answer" as "one of the

greatest examples of biocentric poetry

in American letters"...

from "The Answer"....

Integrity is wholeness

the greatest beauty is

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty

of the universe. Love that, not man

Apart from that, or esle you will share man's pitiful confusions

or drown in despair when his days darken.

Even Jeffers' Calvinist sensibility

finds a place in the environmental

movement of the 21st century...

Roger S. Gotleib writes in

"A Greener Faith" - "The language

of sin may indeed be alienating to many,

especially as it seems to come so easily from the mouths of religious conservatives who are often eager to cast the first stone... We are confronting a profound and wide-ranging failing of virtually every aspect of modern society. Speaking of this failing as a sin indicates (at least) how seriously it should be taken. "

In his introduction to "Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems" -

Jeffers writes of his contemplations of modern poetry during a trip

to gather firewood -

"But now, as I smelled the wild honey midway the trestle and

meditated the direction of modern poetry, my discouragement

blackened."

Jeffers did not see the correct response to the modern day as the breaking down of structure in modern poetry, the loss of coherency, disjuncture, confusion, and so on...

Rather, he sought to elevate the natural world in his poetry - to bring attention to the environment for its own sake. Thus, he is becoming a voice situated within dark green religion in America, as he wrote of a nature intrinsically spiritual, forever divine.

In doing so, he often describes the beauty

of nature as feminine - appreciating the

fertility of all things natural...

As is reflected in his own writings and relationship with his wife, Una,

Jeffers regards her as a passionate force that mirrors the beautiful and

primal force of nature.

"To Death"

'You have a sister named Life, an opulent treacherous

woman'

Here, Jeffers explores gender in a way

that is prophetic of the modern Gaia Movement.. another element that works to reserve his space in contemporary conversation.

Conclusion

Consistently in his writing, Robinson Jeffers is informed by a Calvinist

attitude (inherited from his close relationship with his deeply religious

parents) that, coupled with his pantheism, constructs a tension in his poetry that renders it relevant to voices within the contemporary ecological crisis...

from "The Bed by the Window"

We are safe to finish what we have to

finish;

And then it will sound rather like music

When the patient daemon behind the screen of sea-rock

and sky

Thumps with his staff and calls thrice: "Come, Jeffers."

"Only the whole":

A study of

Robinson

Jeffers

Reconciling the competing identities of a modernist poet on the American west-coast

From "Credo"

The mind

Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to

itself; the heart-breaking beauty

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

Gaia Movement