Nearly thirty years after his death in 1962, Robinson Jeffers occupies a secure niche in the pantheon of American poets. I suspect, indeed, that his place may well be the most secure of all. He has long since weathered the storm of disapproval that centered on his prophetic verse written before, during, and after World War II. Over the past two decades his out-of-print books have been reissued in various editions. And now we have the first two of the four volumes of his collected poetry, beautifully printed and bound; they are, in fact, models of the art of bookmaking.

Certainly no other American poet has approached Jeffers in his ability to endow character with life; his people, tormented and tormenting creatures, haunt the memory like grisly phantoms rising from some atavistic depth of which we were unaware. Passing before the mind’s eye, they reveal those gulfs over which we daily pass. In their strengths and weaknesses we see ourselves; they reveal to us, above all else, how slippery is our hold on reason and how tempting are the lures of irrationality in all its forms. Which is to say, Jeffers did what all great writers have done: he provided insight into the human condition.

Insight, above all else. And that insight does not stop with the human condition, but extends outward into the larger and, for Jeffers, more important natural world. No other poet of this century strove more successfully to “catch the inhuman God” in his lens. In this area, indeed, Jeffers had few peers in all of literature. It was, of course, the “inhuman God”—cleansed of the least taint of anthropomorphism—that Jeffers most cherished, and besought his fellows to turn to as a means of realizing their true humanity and at the same time escaping the introversion and narcissism inherent in merely human-centered concerns. In a late poem, “My Loved Subject,” he commented that though old age prevented him from walking the mountains as in the past, his beloved subject remained unchanged:

Mountains and ocean, rock,
water and beasts and trees

Are the protagonists, the human
people are only symbolic interpreters.

In another poem written in his final years he spoke of “the business of poetry” as being essentially a celebration of the physical world—God’s body, so to speak, of which man makes up a miniscule part:

To feel and speak the

astonishing beauty of things

—earth, stone and water.

Beast, man and woman, sun,

moon and stars—

The blood-shot beauty of

human nature, its thoughts,

frenzies and passions,

And unhuman nature its

towering reality—

For man’s half dream; man,

you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock

And water and sky are

constant—to feel

Greatly, and understand greatly,

and express greatly, the natural

Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.

The rest’s diversion: those holy

or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas.

The love, lust, longing: reasons,

but not the reason.

In several poems, and also in the remarkable essay “Poetry, Gongoriam, and a Thousand Years,” Jeffers expressed his ars poetica—most notably in “Apology for Bad Dreams,” written circa 1925, at the beginning of his great renown. There he disavowed any “moral” intention in the artistic impulse, which was both creative and destructive, similar in nature to the creative-destructive “artistry” of God, Who “brays humanity in a mortar to bring the savor / From the bruised root: a man having bad dreams, who invents victims, is only the ape of that God.” He expressed this essentially amoral aesthetic in a letter when he remarked that “poetry does not necessarily have a ‘message’ except ‘How beautiful things are’—or ‘How sad, or terrible’—or even ‘How exciting.’ These are the only messages that Homer or Shakespeare—for instance—have for us.”

The amazing thing about the poetry in these two enormous volumes, both the lyrics and the long narrative poems, is that all of it may be read with interest by any intelligent reader. One may be disturbed by the poetry, but it is hard to imagine that one might be indifferent to it. By 1920 Jeffers had found his unmistakable “voice,” having left behind him the insignificant efforts of his teens and 20’s; as everyone knows, he matured late. (That early poetry, incidentally, will be published in Volume IV, along with various of his prose statements.) But here we have the fully integrated personality from the very beginning. “To the Stone-Cutters,” for example, appears on the third page of Volume I. Its somber rhythm conveys stoicism in a manner that we have come to regard as typically Jeffersian; its every line bears his unmistakable imprint:

Stone-cutters fighting time with

marble, you fore-defeated

Challengers of oblivion

Eat cynical earnings, knowing

rock splits, records fall down.

The square-limbed Roman letters

Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain.

The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly;

For man will be blotted out,

the blithe earth die, the brave sun

Die blind and blacken to the heart:

Yet stones have stood for a

thousand years, and pained thoughts found

The honey of peace in old poems.

Jeffers was preeminently a “loner,” always keeping his distance from the creeds and faiths of the great masses of men, and of those who pretended to speak to the masses. In a word, he was an aristocrat in the classical sense of the term. He most resembled, in thought and temperament, such solitary figures as Heraclitus, Lucretius, and, to a lesser extent, Nietzsche—and, yes, Emily Dickinson. I have always relished his bemused wonder at those who professed admiration for the Many (as Heraclitus called them). The opening lines of “Wise Men in Their Bad Hours” express a view that seems almost heretical in this age of the Common Man:

Wise men in their bad hours have envied

The little people making merry like grasshoppers

In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking

Backward but never forward, and if they somehow

Take hold upon the future they do it

Half asleep, with the tools of generation

Foolishly reduplicating

Folly in thirty-year periods; they eat and laugh too,

Groan against labors, wars and partings,

Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended

The summer insects enviable;

One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery.

If Jeffers found little in man’s confusion to warrant praise, he did increase our powers of perception; and his stoicism will always befriend us in the dark days when they come.

Nolte_Review_1

[The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Edited by Tim Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press) Volume I, 1920-1928; 521 pp., $60.00; Volume II, 1928-1938; 610 pp., $60.00]