The Poetry of Jeffers by Robinson Jeffers

First published:Flagons and Apples 1912); Californians (1916); Tamar and Other Poems (1924); Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925); The Woman at Point Sur (1927); Cawdor and Other Poems (1928); Dear Judas and Other Poems (1929); Descent to the Dead (1931); Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems (1932); Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933); Solstice and Other Poems (1935); Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1937); The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1938); Be angry at the Sun (1941); Medea (1946); The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948); Hungerfield and Other Poems 1954; The Beginning and the End, 1963

Critical Evaluation:

The history of Robinson Jeffers’ reputation might be represented diagrammatically by the figure of a sharp, inverted V, the apex marked, perhaps, by the year 1933. In 1919, when Jeffers had already published two volumes, Louis Untermeyer did not consider him worthy of inclusion in his famous anthology of American poetry that mirrored the taste of the period as definitely as had Palgrave’s GOLDEN TREASURY in 1861. In 1933, William Rose Benet, in his anthology titled FIFTY POETS, spoke of Jeffers as “the Western Titan of our contemporary poetry” and quoted George Sterling’s statement that “Jeffers clasps hands with the Great Greeks across Time.”

In 1950, a critic considered THE DOUBLE AXE beneath critical notice. Today, Jeffers is neither well remembered nor widely read. Has poetry taken a different direction, or was there some flaw in Jeffers’ work, unnoticed thirty years ago, that has slowly caused the disintegration of a reputation once so massive?

Two facts of Jeffers’ biography seem important to his poetry: first, his study of medicine and, second, his long residence on the coast of California. The first of these gave him the “scientific” point of view, of which much has been made in discussions of the intellectual content of his poems. The second, his home on Carmel Bay, Tor House, which he built in 1914 and occupied until his death, gave him the geographical, the scenic background of so many of his poems, the rocky coast that “clasped hands,” to repeat Sterling’s phrase, with the stony landscape of ancient Greece and its citadels built from the primeval stone. It might almost be maintained that for Jeffers there existed only these two worlds, the coasts of Greece and of California.

After two false starts, Jeffers made his reputation with TAMAR AND OTHER POEMS, published in 1924, and then continued until 1954, ending with a total of fifteen volumes that spanned a period of forty-two years, surely an impressive achievement. It was, however, on the long narrative poems—long, that is, by modern standards—contained in these volumes that Jeffers’ reputation was based: “Tamar,” “Roan Stallion,” “The Loving Shepherdess,” “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” “Hungerfield,” and others, at least one of them running to a hundred pages. These works were written in a period when it was said that a long poem was impossible. There is another group equally long: Jeffers’ rehandling of the Greek myths, although these myths also often stand in the background of his narratives with modern settings. In “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” he rewrote the Orestes legend; “At the Fall of an Age” is a short drama, the climax of which is the death of Helen; “The Cretan Woman” is based on the HIPPOLYTUS of Euripides.

A reading of these long narratives, with their setting on the coast of California, or these reworkings of the Greek legends will reveal easily enough the weakness of Jeffers as a poet. His fault was not his utter pessimism, not his utter contempt for humanity. Rather, it was his extremely narrow range, his constant repetition. In this respect, the only modern poet with whom he can be compared is A. E. Housman, who shared Jeffers’ tragic view of life, who repeated his theme of the transcience of youth and beauty, the peace that comes with death, throughout his two volumes. But Housman had the great virtue of compression; his poems were pared down to three or four quatrains, whereas Jeffers stretched out the agony for page after page. It can even be said that to read one of his narrative poems is to read them all; they are alike in their preoccupation with drunkenness, lust, incest, and murder. It is not the violence that offends, for violence has become a commonplace in modern literature; it is the sameness, for violence can quite easily become as monotonous as virtuous placidity. We grow weary of drunken, lecherous husbands, of frustrated, rebellious wives, of incestuous relationships. The murders and the incendiarisms pall. The characters do not seem real, so complete is their degradation. We detect in them the same unreality, the same lack of social or moral sense, that T. S. Eliot found in the characters in Lawrence’s fiction. It is not that they are immoral, for immoral characters are perfectly recognizable as human beings; it is that they seem to exist in a world completely devoid of all moral values. Each of these doomed families, although it may live in a perfectly real section of the coast of California and may even have contacts with other families, is shut into a kind of private madhouse where horror is the daily fare. Without indulgence in undue sentimentality, we may say that this state of affairs is not recognizably human.

Nor is it quite accurate to assume that because Jeffers depicted such unrelieved tragedy he was clasping hands with the great Greek writers. To be sure, the Greek myths often stand behind his narrative poems: the Pasiphae story is discernible in “Roan Stallion”; in “Hungerfield,” a woman with the implausible name of Alcmena Hungerfield has a son who wrestles—or thinks he does—with Death, just as the classical Alcmena’s son, Herakles, contends with Death in the ALCESTIS of Euripides. But to use the great myths of classical antiquity does not make one a Greek. The tragic narratives of Jeffers are not such in the Aristotelian sense of a reversal of fortune; they do not depict the fall of a great man from the heights of prosperity and happiness to the depths of misery. The characters in these stories have never known happiness; they are drunken, lecherous, cruel, and degraded. Jeffers’ real kinship is not with the Greeks but with the late Elizabethans; he “clasps hands” with such men as Webster and Tourneur and, beyond them in time, with Seneca. As the tragedy of blood developed on the post-Shakespearean stage, the dramatists piled murder upon murder, horror upon horror, until the spectator was driven either to disgust or to a refusal to take the drama seriously. The complicated story of “Tamar” is as unreal in its sensationally gruesome details as those of THE ATHEIST’S TRAGEDY or THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY, and it seems as remote from actuality, yet we are asked to accept this nightmare as a story taking place on the California coast today.

In one of his short poems Jeffers said that the sole purpose of poetry is to feel and completely understand natural beauty; and it is in his ability to put into words the wild, primitive loveliness of the area in which he had made his home that Jeffers was at his best as a poet. Despising humanity, he loved nature—the age-old rocks of the California coast, the gulls, and, above all, the hawks. The rock and the hawk were his main symbols: the rock which will remain long after mankind has vanished and the hawk which represents power and freedom. To Jeffers, nature was not the guide, philosopher, and kindly nurse that it was to Wordsworth; it was indifferent to man, who is, after all, only an incident in the vast history of the planet. In one of Jeffers’ most quoted lines he said that mankind was the mold from which the world should break away. Again, in writing of the defacing of Carmel Point by a housing development, he added that given time nature knew that what man had created would dissolve. But the granite of the cliff at Carmel will remain. In “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” he gave voices to the stones of which the citadel is built; they speak to one another of men as loud, boisterous, and mobile, saying that before the world ends man will be gone. Man, as Jeffers saw him, is not merely an animal; he is below the animals, for he is a blight upon the earth. His empires rise and fall; America will fall like the rest, whereas the hawk will still wheel above the cliffs.

Jeffers’ medical studies provided him with a certain amount of scientific vocabulary and, perhaps, with his coldly objective view of humanity. One gets the impression of a clinically detached attitude, the attitude of the doctor who has treated so many patients that he can no longer think of them as people. Surely many of the characters in the narrative poems are walking examples from a psychologist’s casebook.

In American poetry of this century, Jeffers appears as strictly sui generis; he does not fit into any of the recognized schools or influences. Superficially, on the printed page, his long, flowing lines resemble those of Whitman, but the rhythm of his verse is very different from that of the older poet. Except for his general reaction against the conventionalities of the late Victorians, Jeffers was unlike anyone else writing during his period, and he has apparently exerted no influence on the succeeding generation, as have Pound and Eliot.

In HUNGERFIELD, Jeffers wrote that poets who forget about the agony of life while singing its praises are fools and liars. The statement is certainly true; yet perhaps Jeffers, in an attempt to avoid all false sentiment, went to the other extreme. He was capable of writing beautiful lines, even beautiful short poems. The weakness was that he never varied, never developed; he merely repeated himself. In “To the Stone-Cutters” the poem which in 1933 he considered his best, he said that eventually man, the earth, and the sun would die, the sun blind of eye, black to the heart. This grim theme of vision and statement rings throughout all of his work.

Bibliography

Brophy, Robert J. Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1976.

Brophy, Robert J., ed. The Robinson Jeffers Newsletter: A Jubilee Gathering, 1962-1988. Los Angeles: Occidental College, 1988.

Everson, William. The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1995.

Nolte, William H. Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978.

Thesing, William B. Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Vardamis, Alex A. The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers: A Bibliographical Study. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1972.

Zaller, Robert. The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.