SF Gate
Entertainment Links

SF Gate Home
Today's News
Sports
Entertainment
Technology
Live Views
Traffic
Weather
Health
Business
Bay Area Travel
Columnists
Classifieds
Conferences
Search
Index


Jump to


 

Books

The Whitman of Big Sur
Poet Robinson Jeffers grappled to encompass nature, cruelty and humanity in one vision

Reviewed by Cynthia Haven
  Sunday, April 22, 2001

SELECTED POETRY

OF ROBINSON JEFFERS

By Robinson Jeffers,

edited by Tim Hunt

Stanford University; 747 pages; $75, $24.95 paperback


If a great poet articulates and defines a unique, even necessary, vision of the world, or if as Elizabeth Bishop once said, you can tell a great poem because the next day is seen in the light of it, then you can't do much better than Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) and his work.

So it's a shame that Jeffers has suffered a near total eclipse in the last century, especially when so many lesser names have erupted in Vesuvian flows of literature. (Like proto-environmentalist Jeffers, one can only weep for the trees.) It takes a flight of fancy to recall that the visionary poet of Carmel was once considered equal to Eliot and was a 1932 cover boy for Time. Restitution is under way with Stanford University Press' "Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers," the wrap-up of its two-decades-long publication of the entire Jeffers opus, and the likeliest buy for the general reader.

It's long overdue. The well-worn previous "Selected" edition has been reprinted so many times that Random House has lost track of the sales. Its "Selected Poems" is a slender 111 pages. At nearly 750 pages, the new "Selected" may be one of the heftiest ever created for any poet.

Stanford's groundbreaking series is the first scholarly edition of Jeffers' works. The point: Jeffers' reputation has been kept alive by the ordinary people who love his poems. This situation is

astonishing, perhaps unique, in contemporary American literature, where academia and class-assignment sales stoke a continuing interest in a poet's legacy.

Jeffers' poetry is cut to a Pacific scale, a direct descendant of Whitman's.

His rolling, oratorical, free-verse lines follow the lineaments of the Psalms more than "The Waste Land," repudiating the Modernism that Jeffers said "had turned off the road into a narrowing lane." Jeffers remains the preacher's son who could see the crucified Christ in a hawk, and in a vision of the Christ child, a pleiad of quasi-Egyptian angels, with "birds' heads, hawks' heads."

But in Jeffers' lines, endless as Whitman's, the good gray poet's bright promise has given way to urban desolation, the glories of America's promise to pollution, war and genocide. This is Whitmanism, but Whitmanism exhausted. Jeffers was uncommonly sensitive to violence, yet luridly obsessed with it; his World War II pacifism cost him an audience.

The effect of reading these poems, one after another, is to reveal Jeffers' lifelong argument with himself, as he grapples to encompass nature, cruelty and humanity in one vision. What critic Helen Vendler calls with condescension Jeffers' "craggy philosophy" is more likely a tortured one, for he concludes humanity is a hideous disease ("You would be wise, you far stars,/ To flee with the speed of light this infection.") that must suffer a dreadful cure: "some day the coast will lose patience and dip/ And be clean."

He answers modernity with his philosophy of "inhumanism": "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."

At a time when nature poetry was not the fashion, Jeffers thought that we were fools to ignore the superhuman beauty of the world to dredge our own minds. Perhaps that's why Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz has championed him: His themes are apocalyptic, a bracing antidote to the modern poetic confessional and self-absorbed drivel.

The gothic narratives, too, with their themes of incest and sadism, perhaps take the argument further. They explore the outer reaches of human behavior in a quest for spiritual freedom. Hence, their limitation: Man freed from cultural restrictions is not necessarily a violator of them (his rebellion would imply the opposite). Jeffers was free, instead, when he observed the flight of a hawk.

Tim Hunt, one of the nation's leading Jeffers scholars, has done a masterful job of sorting and choosing from a huge amount of material. Some will quarrel with his choices. Surely, some of the long narratives might have been sacrificed in the interest of a trimmer and perhaps more affordable "Selected," and, after all, the handsome, multivolume Stanford "Collected," which concludes this spring with Volume 5, documenting the scholarly apparatus underlying the series, contains the total.

No one has ever accused Jeffers of writing too little. What is startling, then, for all his putative windiness, is that his epigrams endure like granite:

"A stone is a better pillow than many visions"; "The strong lean upon death as on a rock"; "all our pain comes from restraint of love"; and "I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk."

For those who prefer the image to the word, "Stones of Big Sur," coming out in June, also from Stanford University Press, offers an elegant coda to the remarkable series, with more than 50 stunning photographs, pairing Jeffers' verse with images from the coast. California photographer Morley Baer died in 1995, in the midst of this collaboration with Jeffers scholar James Karman of California State University at Chico. His life's postscript is to offer us this, the majestic, eternal conversation between stone and sea.@bx

@

Cynthia Haven has written most recently for San Francisco magazine and Minnesota Monthly. / Cynthia Haven has written most recently for San Francisco magazine and Minnesota Monthly.


 
· Printer-friendly version
· Email this article to a friend


Technology/Bioscience
ENGR-OPS
MGR/NETWORK SYS ENG, 5-7 yrs exp. in

BIOTECH
X-MINE is a computational

ENVIRONMENTAL
Cambria is a leading West Coast cons

ARCHITECT
Project Architect/Mgr Walnut Creek f

COMPUTER
Associate Court Systems Administrato

COUNTERTOPS
SHOP FORMAN M/F 10 YRS. EXP. $30
MODERN WOODWORKS

ARCHITECT
Andrew Skurman, Architect. Prominent

ENGINEER
SCADA Controls Engineer I, II

AVIATION
FUEL FACILITY Aircraft Service Int'l

About Top Jobs


03/21/2001 - ABCs of Milosz -- A Life in Letters .

01/31/1999 - An Exploration of Darkness, a Celebration of Light .

more related articles...




Feedback

SF Gate


 

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle   Page 1
 


line
Food   Movies   Music & Nightlife   Performance   Art   Events   Books   TV   Radio  Gay 
line