Robinson Jeffers, Poet and Prophet
April 3, 2019 12:51 PM   Subscribe

"Poet Against Empire" from Chronicles. The article explores the life and poetry of Jeffers. "Just how big Jeffers had once been is hard to convey today, and so is the depth of his collapse in reputation." Previously and previously on the Blue (with lots of links in the OPs and comments).
posted by Fukiyama (12 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don't really seek out poetry, but there are a handful of poems that have really stuck with me over the years. One of them is Hurt Hawks by Jeffers. It's just perfect. It made Ursula Le Guin cry!
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:03 PM on April 3, 2019 [5 favorites]


I always but always confuse the poets Robinson Jeffers and Edward Arlington Robinson, another poet who was huge in the 1920s, but is possibly even more forgotten today. Though other than the coincidence of their names, they had very little in common.

It's always impossible to predict what writers are widely read past their era.
posted by Kattullus at 1:31 PM on April 3, 2019 [1 favorite]


Distance makes clean.
posted by chavenet at 1:47 PM on April 3, 2019 [2 favorites]


Now that I have thought a little bit more, I think the problem with Jeffers is that he doesn't leave much room for the reader in his verse. He's one of those writers who thinks on behalf of readers, telling them what to think and feel. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but when there's not much room for interpretation, the reader doesn't get to stake a claim on a poem, and can only make it theirs if the poems' thoughts can be read as if they're readers' own. As time goes by, thoughts become ever less likely to be thought in the same way again, and poetry like Jeffers' becomes flotsam on the sea of centuries.

Who knows, though, maybe he'll drift ashore at a time when again his thoughts are read thoughts.
posted by Kattullus at 3:00 PM on April 3, 2019 [5 favorites]



Ascent To The Sierras

Beyond the great valley an odd instinctive rising
Begins to possess the ground, the flatness gathers
to little humps and
barrows, low aimless ridges,
A sudden violence of rock crowns them. The crowded
orchards end, they
have come to a stone knife;
The farms are finished; the sudden foot of the
slerra. Hill over hill,
snow-ridge beyond mountain gather
The blue air of their height about them.

Here at the foot of the pass
The fierce clans of the mountain you'd think for
thousands of years,
Men with harsh mouths and eyes like the eagles' hunger,
Have gathered among these rocks at the dead hour
Of the morning star and the stars waning
To raid the plain and at moonrise returning driven
Their scared booty to the highlands, the tossing horns
And glazed eyes in the light of torches. The men have
looked back
Standing above these rock-heads to bark laughter
At the burning granaries and the farms and the town
That sow the dark flat land with terrible rubies...
lighting the dead...
It is not true: from this land
The curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace
with the valleys; no
blood in the sod; there is no old sword
Keeping grim rust, no primal sorrow. The people are
all one people, their
homes never knew harrying;
The tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless
as deer. Oh, fortunate
earth; you must find someone
To make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds
of the future,
against the wolf in men's hearts?


by Robinson Jeffers
posted by Oyéah at 3:13 PM on April 3, 2019 [1 favorite]


I fiercely love Jeffers.
Cawdor
, oohooof.

Rock and Hawk

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.
posted by kokaku at 3:38 PM on April 3, 2019 [2 favorites]


"Ascent To The Sierras" is a fine poem, though I think the Spaniards might protest that they were a perfectly good primal sorrow, and count as part of the terrain by now.

I always wish that Jeffers would stop writing poems about how nature is more worthy of attention than humans, and write some poems about nature. Occasionally, he does.

ANIMALS

At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll
in the sea,
Bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded, idle
and singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold winter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives in
the sun:
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do
with oxygen and salted water; the would look
monstrous
If we could see them: the beautiful passionate bodies of
living flame, batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride
the storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are. There
are many other chemistries of animal life
Beside the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and
amino-acids.
posted by ckridge at 3:53 PM on April 3, 2019 [3 favorites]


It is not true: from this land
The curse was lifted; the highlands have kept peace
with the valleys; no
blood in the sod; there is no old sword
Keeping grim rust, no primal sorrow. The people are
all one people, their
homes never knew harrying;
The tribes before them were acorn-eaters, harmless
as deer. …

Until (we) white people came there and exterminated them down to the very last person, Ishi, about whom, by an interesting coincidence, Ursula K(roeber) LeGuin's father AL Kroeber wrote an elegiac and affecting book.

It was easier not to know about all that in Jeffer's time, but the naïve ignorance of this poem strikes me as willful.
posted by jamjam at 4:13 PM on April 3, 2019 [3 favorites]


Jeffers has gotten me through more than one day of news in the last few years. What is old is new again.
--
Be Angry At The Sun

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.
posted by CosmicRayCharles at 8:08 PM on April 3, 2019 [3 favorites]




On a trip down to Big Sur from San Francisco one year I stopped at the Tor House, Jeffers's longtime home in Carmel-by-the-Sea. It is a pretty interesting place and I highly recommend a visit to anyone in the area who is interested in Jeffers. They give little tours of the house, which he had an interesting relationship with. He built the thing by rolling boulders up out of the surf, and was prone to taking rocks and architectural features from various places he traveled to and incorporating them into the structure of the house.

Jeffers wrote a poem about it which I've always thought was quite lovely, Tor House. "my fingers had the art / To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant."

I recently discovered that James Tate wrote a poem about visiting Tor House, too, which captures something of the modern surroundings of the place: Failed Tribute to the Stonemason of Tor House, Robinson Jeffers .
posted by whir at 6:37 PM on April 4, 2019 [2 favorites]


With the caveat that everything I know about Philip Jenkins, the author of this appreciation, suggests that he's a kind of mild-mannered, "moderate," NeverTrumper sort who's written widely on the history of religions, I am not at all surprised to watch him hoist Robinson Jeffers to the status of patron saint of the leading paleocon journal, a journal that still brags of their endorsements by Pat "we haven’t fully assimilated African-American citizens" Buchanan and by Clyde Wilson, founder of the neo-confederate League of the South.

Not surprised because it's pretty easy to read Jeffers and take "pwease no steppy" as the message of his work, which is a simplification, but one to which so much of his poetry lends itself too well. The insistence on "freedom," uncomplicated by any further examination of from what and for who, the distaste for modernity, the dwelling on purity and its violations*, the air of aristocratic aloofness, are all qualities that tend to attract certain kinds of libertarians, paleocons, and angsty teen boys alike. Despite all this, I'm still fond of Jeffers. He's a poet of mood and at his best he can evoke an almost Anglo-Saxon poignancy and at his less-than-best
"Two wars, and they breed a third. Now guard the beaches, watch the north, / trust not the dawns. Probe every cloud. / Build power. Fortress America may yet for a long time stand, between the east and the west, like Byzantium. / —As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. It is a foolish business to see the future and screech at it."

— "So Many Blood-Lakes" (12 May, 1944)
he can sound like somebody LARPing Tolkien.
(*" ... when he wanted to be, Jeffers was shockingly good at depicting low life. One party-goer has brought along a pair of louche waitresses on the razzle, one of whom—horrible to relate—strips to reveal extensive tattoos.")
Heavens!
posted by octobersurprise at 10:50 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]


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