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LAST WORD: The fifth book of Jeffers's poems arrives
this fall. |
Tony Sollecito |
ROBINSON JEFFERS.
Never heard of him? You’re not alone, and it’s rather a wonder.
One of the bestselling American poets ever, Jeffers (1887-1962) once ranked
alongside T.S. Eliot. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1932,
and The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers was reprinted so many
times that Random House lost track of sales. Tor House, the stunning,
invincible granite cottage Jeffers built with his own hands in Carmel,
Calif., remains the focus of literary pilgrimage.
Yet, as California poet Dana Gioia, ’73, MBA ’77, wrote in
his essay “Strong Counsel,” “No major American poet has
been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers.” Jeffers’s
pessimism about the human race didn’t sit well during the dark Depression
years, and his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II turned respect
to ridicule. His exaltation of nature above humankind also ran counter
to 20th-century sensibilities. “I’d sooner, except the penalties,
kill a man than a hawk,” he wrote.
Jeffers retained many fans nevertheless. Unlike most contemporary American
poetry, his legacy has been kept alive by individuals who love his work,
not by academia’s class-assignment sales. Such luminaries as Stanford’s
late Yvor Winters, who in 1947 declared Jeffers’s work “unmastered
and self-inflicted hysteria,” effectively banned him from the curriculum.
There was never an authoritative, scholarly edition of California’s
premier bard—until Stanford University Press came to the rescue.
In the 1980s, the press launched a 20-year project to publish Jeffers’s
entire oeuvre. This fall, the fifth and final volume of The Collected
Poetry of Robinson Jeffers will be released. Three other books cap
the project: Stones of the Sur (2001), a pairing of Morley Baer’s
photography and Jeffers’s verse; a new Selected Poetry (2001);
and The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers (2003).
Critical acclaim has been resounding. “Jeffers is the last of the
major poets of his generation—Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore,
Eliot—to get his collected poems,” wrote the Philadelphia
Inquirer. “Now that the job is at hand, it is done very well.”
The Los Angeles Times exulted: “It is hard to see how anyone
can read Jeffers’s best poetry and not perceive greatness.”
The San Francisco Chronicle praised the volumes for establishing
“the verse legacy of a poet who looked on all things with the eyes
of eternity.”
Eternity to Jeffers was rock and sea and hawk and trees. With his wife,
Una, who endured a scandalous divorce to marry him, he moved to Carmel
in 1914. Jeffers wrote incessantly: piercing lyrics of nature and prophecy,
and obsessive narratives—combining violence, illicit sex and the
quest for spiritual freedom—that created a popular sensation. In
their cottage by the sea, he and Una raised twin sons and grew increasingly
reclusive. “One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men,”
he wrote. And so he promulgated his theory of “inhumanism”:
“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; / We must inhumanize
our views a little, and become confident /As the rock and ocean that we
were made from.”
For some, the philosophy was a lodestone. Tim Hunt, a professor of English
at Washington State who edited Stanford’s Collected Poetry and
Selected Poetry, first heard of Jeffers as a high school student
in Sonoma, Calif. Hunt says his English teacher had lived in Carmel and
told the class, “A lot of people think Frost is the great American
poet—some of us think it is Jeffers.”
“The name stuck,” recalls Hunt. Later, in a Sebastopol, Calif.,
library, he thumbed through a volume of Jeffers. “Whatever it was,
it was not what they told me poetry was. What struck me was a lack of
pose. He was writing about real things, because he felt deeply about them.
It wasn’t a poetry of irony and indirection. It startled me into
being curious enough to read more.”
Hunt hoped to study Jeffers at Cornell, but found “he didn’t
exist, as far as the academy was concerned. I wondered if the academy
was off the mark or I was off the mark. I studied literature to understand
that disparity—my experience of Jeffers, and the canon.”
James Karman, professor of English at Cal State-Chico and editor of Stones
of the Sur and Collected Letters, was similarly impressed by
Jeffers. He recalls reading “Shine, Perishing Republic” in the
volatile 1960s. “That poem addresses the spirit of protest—essential,
but sometimes futile. Our generation didn’t accept the futility of
protest. In those more somber moments, he extended the reach of my own
mind and helped me put events in a larger historical context.”
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Estate of Morley Baer |
At Stanford University Press, the project’s beginnings
were more incidental: “In truth, it was an over-the-transom submission,”
quips Helen Tartar, the humanities editor who has managed the project.
Yet she and Norris Pope, ’68, then assistant director (and now editorial
director), were eager when “the Jeffers people”—friends,
fans, readers and family—approached the press to publish the collected
works. “A major authoritative edition struck me as immensely valuable,
and just what university presses are meant to publish,” says Pope.
The late George White, founding president of the Tor House Foundation,
spearheaded the proposal. Partway through a mid-1980s Jeffers Festival
in Carmel, he had taken foundation members and visiting young scholars
to a local restaurant. “George looked around the table,” Hunt
recalls. “He said, ‘The centennial [of Jeffers’s birth]
is in two years. We need a collected poetry, a good critical biography,
a new selected letters—who’s going to do what?’” Karman
says both he and Hunt left with a sense of mission.
Gradually, the Stanford Press was drawn to the task. Tartar became friends
with the late Lee Jeffers, widow of Jeffers’s son Donnan, and came
to know something of Jeffers’s spirit. She recalls a cold January
evening at Tor House, discussing Jeffers in front of the kitchen fire.
Tartar found a branch to rescue a panicky ant she saw scrambling along
a log that had been thrown on the fire. Lee remarked that such gestures
were typical of Jeffers. “‘He couldn’t bear suffering—the
contemplation of suffering was terrible for him,’” Tartar recalls
Lee telling her.
As the project gathered momentum, it drew some of the finest California
talent. Adrian Wilson volunteered to design the five-volume Collected
Poetry. “This was the last design of Wilson, who was a very,
very distinguished book designer,” says Pope. “Purely typographically,
it is the handsomest of the books Stanford has ever produced.” Wilson
died before the first volume appeared in 1988.
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HANDMADE: Jeffers built both house and tower. |
Estate of Morley Baer |
The late Morley Baer, a noted California landscape and
architectural photographer and longtime Jeffers devotee, approached Karman
about pairing his work with verses from Jeffers.
“He told me once that he had become convinced that
he finally understood what Jeffers meant when he said stones are alive,”
says Karman. “Jeffers went so far as to say they were conscious,
in some way. It is difficult to imagine what kind of consciousness a stone
would have—but Jeffers and Baer went some way to imagine just that,”
he says, citing Jeffers’s belief that “if you know stone, in
a fundamental way, you know God.”
Pope, a native Californian, had a personal link to the Baer project, which
resulted in Stones of the Sur. While finishing his Oxford doctorate
in Berkeley, he had served as Baer’s assistant. “It was a revelation
to watch a master view-camera photographer work,” he says.
It is hard to tell whether Stanford’s involvement started a Jeffers
revival or capitalized on one already under way. Former U.S. poet laureate
Robert Hass, PhD ’76, edited the popular Rock and Hawk: A Selection
of Shorter Poems in 1987. Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz championed
Jeffers in Polish even as he decried his inhumanism, writing in the essay
“Carmel”: “He bet everything, drew his own conclusions
in voluntary isolation, making no attempt to please anyone, holding his
own. . . . Jeffers’s work resembles nothing else produced in this
century. . . .”
But certainly the Stanford series helped reawaken interest. “They’ve
taken Jeffers seriously as one of America’s greatest poets —and
as a California poet, they’ve given him the attention he deserves,”
says Karman.
Hunt is equally effusive. “When a major university press puts its
prestige on the line, which Stanford has done, and produces the volumes
in the way they have done, it encourages people to take a new look. It
brings people back. This edition makes the poetry much more available
than it has been for years. It’s not my editing—it’s Stanford.”
Cynthia Haven writes regularly on arts
and letters for STANFORD.
Salmon Fishing
The days shorten, the south blows wide for showers now,
The south wind shouts to the rivers,
The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon
Race up into the freshet.
In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
Of a long angry sundown,
Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers,
Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
Like the priests of the people that built Stonehenge,
Dark silent forms, performing
Remote solemnities in the red shallows
Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn,
Drawing landward their live bullion, the bloody mouths
And scales full of the sunset
Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will
The wild Pacific pasture nor wanton and spawning
Race up into fresh water.
—Robinson Jeffers
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