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.
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